The use of names initially seems to bolster the friendliness of the gathering we feel we know these people as, one by one, their names are called in alphabetical order. The story opens innocently enough, as the townspeople gather for an unidentified annual event connected to the harvest. Readers, lulled into this false summer complacency, begin to feel horror, their moods changing with the narrator’s careful use of evidence and suspense, until the full realization of the appalling ritual murder bursts almost unbearably on them. A modern horror story, it derives its effect from a reversal of the readers’ expectations, already established by the ordinary setting of a warm June day in a rural community. It may well be the world’s most frequently anthologized short story.
In 1965, Jackson died of heart failure in her sleep, at her home in North Bennington Vermont, at the age of 48.Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s The LotteryĪs were many of Shirley Jackson’s stories, “The Lottery” was first published in the New Yorker and, subsequently, as the title story of The Lottery: or, The Adventures of James Harris in 1949.
Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as revealed by Hyman's statement that she "was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned The Lottery', and she felt that they at least understood the story". She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years." Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson's works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of "personal, even neurotic, fantasies", but that Jackson intended, as "a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb", to mirror humanity's Cold War-era fears. Jackson's husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that "she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements.
In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received." Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse." She is best known for her dystopian short story, "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. She has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. Shirley Jackson was an influential American author.
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