The Shirley Jackson Project by Robert Kirby

When I spoke to Friend recently-she is the only one of the letter writers I could track down who is still alive-she still remembered how upsetting she had found “The Lottery.” “I don’t know how anyone approved of that story,” she told me. “The Lottery” has been adapted for stage, television, opera, and ballet it was even featured in an episode of “The Simpsons.” By now it is so familiar that it is hard to remember how shocking it originally seemed: “outrageous,” “gruesome,” or just “utterly pointless,” in the words of some of the readers who were moved to write.

Jackson’s story, in which the residents of an unidentified American village participate in an annual rite of stoning to death a person chosen among them by drawing lots, would quickly become one of the best known and most frequently anthologized short stories in English. “Will you please send us a brief explanation before my husband and I scratch right through our scalps trying to fathom it?”įriend’s note was among the first of the torrent of letters that arrived at The New Yorker in the wake of “The Lottery”-the most mail the magazine had ever received in response to a work of fiction. “I frankly confess to being completely baffled by Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery,’ ” she wrote in a letter to the editor after reading the story. An exact contemporary of Jackson’s-both women were born in 1916-she had recently left her job as a corporate librarian to care for her infant son, and she was a faithful reader of The New Yorker.

When Shirley Jackson’s story “ The Lottery” was first published, in the June 26, 1948, issue of this magazine, Miriam Friend was a young mother living in Roselle, New Jersey, with her husband, a chemical engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project.

The Shirley Jackson Project by Robert Kirby