| Our fiction editor Deborah Treisman reflects on Shirley Jackson’s celebrated short story. Shirley Jackson’s famous (some would say infamous) short story “The Lottery” was first published, in The New Yorker, seventy-five years ago this month. The story was launched into a world still recovering from the shock and devastation of a war in which communities had turned on their own members, offering them up for murder—or, in some cases, carrying out the killing themselves. “The Lottery,” in which townspeople draw lots to see who among them will become the victim of a yearly ritual revealed only at the story’s end, perhaps veered too close to a representation of truth. The response in letters to the editor—hundreds of them, more than any other New Yorker story had inspired—was, for the most part, either confused or outraged. “One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers,” Jackson said in a lecture that was posthumously published under the title “Biography of a Story.” “I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote. It had simply never occurred to me that these millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open.” Those letter-writers perhaps felt tricked. They had started with what seemed like a bucolic portrait of small-town America—“The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock”—and had ended with a revelation of the evil within us. Some readers were angered by this depiction. Some were convinced that the story was true—and even, according to Jackson’s biographer, Ruth Franklin, a New Yorker contributor, “wanted to know where such lotteries were held, and whether they could go and watch.” It may be hard to recapture the surprise and horror of that first reading of “The Lottery,” now that it is considered a classic—adapted for film and theatre, much anthologized, and read by schoolchildren. We may be hardened to the shock of the story by the many more graphic depictions of horror available in novels and movies. Still, any time I see a group normalizing the act of turning on one of its own, I think of Bill Hutchinson forcing that slip of paper out of his wife’s hand and Mr. Summers saying, “All right, folks. Let’s finish quickly.” | 
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