" The Lottery" is a short story by Shirley Jackson that was first published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948. The story describes a fictional small American community that observes an annual tradition known as "the lottery", which is intended to ensure a good harvest and purge the town of bad omens. The lottery, its preparations, and its execution are all described in detail, though it is not revealed until the end what actually happens to the person selected by the random lottery: the selected member of the community is stoned to death by the other townspeople.
Jackson and The New Yorker were both surprised by the initial negative response from readers; subscriptions were canceled and large amounts of hate mail were sent throughout the summer of its first publication, with Jackson receiving at least 10 letters per day.
The Union of South Africa banned it because some parts of Africa used stoning as a punishment.The story has been dramatized several times, including as a radio drama, film, and graphic novel. It has been subjected to considerable sociological and literary analysis and has been described as one of the most famous short stories in the history of American literature.
The lottery preparations start the night before, with coal merchant Mr. Summers and postmaster Mr. Graves drawing up a list of all the extended families in town and preparing one paper slip per family. The slips are folded and placed in an age-stained black wooden box which is stored in a safe at Mr. Summers' office until the lottery is scheduled to begin.
The initial drawing takes place to choose one family. There is a sense of relief in those not chosen and in one case a family member is sent to pass word to their injured father that their family was not picked. Bill Hutchinson draws the only marked slip in the box, and his wife Tessie complains that he was rushed into making his choice. Since their family consists of only one household, the second drawing to choose a household is skipped.
For the final drawing, one slip is placed in the box for each member of the Hutchinson household: Bill, Tessie, and each of their three children. Each of the five draws a slip, and Tessie gets the marked one. The townspeople, including Tessie's young son Davy, pick up the gathered stones and human sacrifice as Tessie screams about the unfairness of the lottery.
Jackson lived in North Bennington, and her comment reveals that she had Bennington in mind when she wrote "The Lottery". In a 1960 lecture (printed in her 1968 collection Come Along with Me) she recalled the hate mail she received in 1948:
The New Yorker kept no records of the phone calls, but letters addressed to Jackson were forwarded to her. That summer she regularly took home 10 to 12 forwarded letters each day. She also received weekly packages from The New Yorker containing letters and questions addressed to the magazine or editor Harold Ross, plus carbon copies of the magazine's responses mailed to letter writers.
Fritz Oehlschlaeger, in "The Stoning of Mistress Hutchinson: Meaning and Context in 'The Lottery ( Essays in Literature, 1988), wrote:
The 1992 The Simpsons episode "Dog of Death" features a scene referring to "The Lottery". During the peak of the lottery fever in Springfield, news anchor Kent Brockman announces on television that people hoping to get tips on how to win the jackpot have borrowed every available copy of Shirley Jackson's book The Lottery at the local library. One of them is Homer Simpson, who throws the book into the fire after Brockman reveals that "Of course, the book does not contain any hints on how to win the lottery. It is, rather, a chilling tale of conformity gone mad."
In her book Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, Bernice Murphy comments that this scene displays some of the most contradictory things about Jackson: "It says a lot about the visibility of Jackson's most notorious tale that more than 50 years after its initial creation it is still famous enough to warrant a mention in the world's most famous sitcom. The fact that Springfield's citizenry also miss the point of Jackson's story completely ... can perhaps be seen as an indication of a more general misrepresentation of Jackson and her work."In "Arbitrary Condemnation and Sanctioned Violence in Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery (December 2004), Patrick J. Shields suggests there is a connection between the death penalty and "The Lottery" when writing:
Others have made comparisons between the lottery and the military draft, whereby young men aged 18–25 were selected at random for military service by the Selective Service System. The story was written just three years after the end of World War II, in which ten million American men were drafted and over 400,000 died, and was published just two days after the enactment of the Military Selective Service Act, which re-established the draft.
The story served as the inspiration for the 2008 South Park episode "Britney's New Look".
The story was also parodied in the 2014 Regular Show episode "Terror Tales of the Park IV", in the segment "The Hole" (a.k.a. "The Wonderful Adventure of the Mysterious Hole in the Park"), described as "reimagining some classic literature".
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