If you attended public school in the United States, odds are that you at some point were assigned to read Shirley Jackson‘s short story, The Lottery. Shirley was born on today’s date in 1916 and 32 years later went on to write the famous story for The New Yorker that went down in history for readers and students alike.
No other content in the New Yorker had elicited as large a response as The Lottery. Some readers cancelled their subscriptions, others wrote in to her in disgust. The story of barbaric ritual set in a modern world left many people wondering what her motives were. Despite constant prodding and hoards of letters written to her, she never really explained outside of saying,
“Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”
Her lack of real discussion of the story may be what has caused it to be one of America’s most studied literary works. Regardless of her take, the assigned analysis of this story is an experience I think many of us can relate to.
If your memory of the plot is fuzzy or if you were never forced to read it as a child, here are the two parts to the roughly 18 minute film version of the story produced in 1969.
