Jackson later recalled that the magazine’s fiction editor asked if she had an interpretation of the story, telling her that Ross “was not altogether sure that he understood the story, and asked if I cared to enlarge about its meaning. Editors at The New Yorker were puzzled by the story.Įven Harold Ross, editor of the magazine at the time, copped to not understanding it. Brendan Gill, a young staffer at the time, would later say that 'The Lottery' was “one of the best stories-two or three or four best-that the magazine ever printed.” 3. When “The Lottery” came in, the decision to publish it in The New Yorker was nearly unanimous.Īccording to Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, there was only one exception-editor William Maxwell, who said the story was “contrived” and “heavy-handed.” The rest, though, were in agreement. Though her agent didn’t care for 'The Lottery,' she sent it off to The New Yorker anyway, telling Jackson in a note that it was her job to sell it, not like it. The writing came easily Jackson dashed out the story in under two hours, making only “two minor corrections” when she read it later-“I felt strongly that I didn’t want to fuss with it”-and sent it to her agent the next day. She remembered later that the idea “had come to me while I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller-it was, as I say, a warm morning, and the hill was steep, and beside my daughter, the stroller held the day’s groceries-and perhaps the effort of that last 50 yards up the hill put an edge to the story.”

Jackson, who lived in North Bennington, Vermont, wrote the story on a warm June day after running errands. Writing “The Lottery” was a snap for Shirley Jackson. “It was not my first published story, nor my last,” the writer recounted in a 1960 lecture, “but I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote and published, there would still be people who would not forget my name.” Here are a few things you might not have known about “The Lottery.” 1. Though now a classic, the story-about a small New England village whose residents follow an annual rite in which they draw slips of paper until, finally, one of them is selected to be stoned to death-caused an immediate outcry when it was published, and gave Jackson literary notoriety. But inside was a story that editors at the magazine would, more than half a century later, call “ perhaps the most controversial short story The New Yorker has ever published”: Shirley Jackson’s “ The Lottery.”

There was nothing to outwardly indicate that it would be any different, or any more special, than any other issue. On June 26, 1948, subscribers to The New Yorker received a new issue of the magazine in the mail.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson