Readers, we’re delighted to announce our upcoming main feed episode will be a return to a Novel Pairings favorite—Short Story Club! We wanted to come back in a big way and could think of no better story to read and analyze together than “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. This jarring and macabre story about a small New England village garners big thematic conversation, especially in high school classrooms all over the United States.
We hope you’ll read along with us before our episode airs next week (and read on for some context on Jackson and her infamous story). You can read “The Lottery” online, courtesy of The New Yorker who originally published the story in 1948. This digital edition of the story also includes an audio reading of the text, perfect for on-the-go listening.
More on Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson was a novelist, essayist, and creative, but behind the scenes of Jackson’s genius was a woman working hard to balance motherhood and marriage with her creative aspirations. Jackson was born and raised in California to a wealthy family before her father’s job abruptly took them to Rochester, NY during her senior year of high school. Jackson went on to study for two years at the University of Rochester before flunking out, taking a year off, and then attending Syracuse University where she met her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman.
After the couple settled in North Bennington, Vermont with their first child and Hyman teaching at the local college, Jackson went on to manage the bulk of family affairs while also trying to write and publish her own stories and her first novel. Jackson’s gained notoriety with the publication of her most well-known short story, “The Lottery,” and continued to write in short story form, full-length novels and even essays on family life and the mundanity of living in a quiet New England village.
Shirley Jackson would go on to raise four children while managing a household, both leaving her with rather complicated feelings towards her position and her partner. In an article from The Cut, some of Jackson’s frustrations are revealed through a drawing she made, showing her husband lying down for a nap, stating, “I thought I'd rest awhile, dear. I did three paragraphs all at once and it tired me out,”while Jackson continues on with her day of writing, parenting, and “adulting,” holding onto one leg of her child. But as Ruth Franklin writes in the same piece, “she needed the children as much as they needed her. Their imaginations energized her; their routines stabilized her” and her work.
It was these years writing for women’s magazines that made Shirley Jackson the breadwinner of the family. As years went on and Jackson’s health became more complicated due to a myriad of health concerns including her anxiety, depression and agoraphobia, as well as prescribed medicines for weight loss and headaches, Shirley Jackson eventually passed away in her sleep from heart failure at the age of 48.
To hear from Jackson’s son Barry, watch this interview of Hyman visiting his family home in North Bennington.
About “The Lottery”
A bit of mythology and lore surround how Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” came to be. As Jackson explained, the idea came while pushing her daughter in her stroller after getting groceries. Jackson set her daughter down in her playpen, put the frozen veggies away, and typed out the controversial story in three hours, sending it off to her agent. The way Jackson remembers the story’s publication is that it was from idea to presses within three weeks with only one tweak—the date of the yearly ritual that takes place in “The Lottery” would be changed to match the date the story would appear in print.
In truth, there was a bit more time between writing and publication, and the piece did go through a few rounds of edit (you can check out this galley of “The Lottery,” courtesy of the Library of Congress). After the story was published in the June 27th edition of the New Yorker, the reactions to Jackson’s story were strong and numerous. The publication had never received as many responses to a story as they did “The Lottery.” Many were outraged at the premise, some were alarmed and demanded to know where this ritual took place. Jackson herself picked up more than 300 responses from her little post office in North Bennington, and she kept many of the responses tucked away.
Jackson, for the most part, shied away from providing any clarity on the intended meaning of the story. In the end, she said this in the San Francisco Chronicle: “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.”
Final Words
Readers, we hope you are as fascinated as we are to learn more about Shirley Jackson and her work. In next week’s newsletter we’ll have a link roundup for a deeper dive on Jackson’s famous piece. We can’t wait to talk about this riveting text with you. Until then, we declare after all, there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book.
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