“The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson’s most recognized short story, tells the fictional tale of a ritual sacrifice conducted each year on June 26 in a small rural town in America.
Almost immediately after the story was published, Shirley and The New Yorker magazine started getting letters, mostly from readers asking what exactly the story meant. Scattered among them were a few subscription cancellations; a handful of “what’s wrong with you” demands; accusations of prejudice against small country towns; and a few notes asking where the event took place because people wanted to watch it for themselves.
In the story, a group of townspeople begin to gather on the day of an annual event on the town’s calendar. At first the reader isn’t sure what is happening in the town square on a beautiful summer afternoon, but by the end of the story, the sunny day turns sinister with a violent, horrific yet routine sacrifice of one of the town’s own.
Jackson herself never really spoke to the story’s meaning, preferring to leave it to reader and critic interpretation. She did tell a friend: “The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washing machine at the end would amaze you.”
The haunting story exposes the darkest part of ourselves, which is a theme that Shirley Jackson, the writer, is known for. But that label became something of a stigma to Shirley, who spent the rest of her life trying to move beyond that one short story to create a body of work that encompassed more than just horror.
Shirley was born in 1916 in San Francisco. While she and her brother enjoyed a comfortable childhood, Shirley had a difficult relationship with her mother, who was critical of her imaginative daughter who preferred to write rather than play with other children. She also nagged Shirley about her weight and appearance, criticism that followed Shirley her entire life.
The family moved to Rochester, New York before Shirley’s senior year in high school, which further isolated Shirley from her peers. She graduated and started college at the University of Rochester, so Shirley’s mother could keep an eye on her daughter. But Shirley hated it, and after taking a year off from school, transferred to Syracuse University. The fresh start gave her the independence she needed.
Shirley studied journalism, but her first love was creative writing — and she excelled at it. She joined the literary magazine and met Stanley Edgar Hyman, whom she married in 1940. The couple moved to New York City, where Stanley worked as a weekly contributor to The New Yorker magazine, and Shirley wrote short stories for publication.
In 1945 Stanley took a teaching job at Bennington College in Vermont, and the couple moved with their infant son, Laurence. Shirley soon had another baby, a daughter, and set up house in an old Victorian in North Bennington. She continued to write, carving out a spot in the studio with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that held most of the couple’s estimated 25,000 books.
It was on her way home from dropping Laurence off at kindergarten that Shirley, pregnant again and pushing her two-and-a-half year old daughter in her stroller, got the idea for “The Lottery”. She raced home, put her daughter in her playpen and the groceries away, and sat down to write.
By the time Laurence came home for lunch, the story was done. The next day, Shirley typed up the manuscript and sent it to her agent to submit for publication. The New Yorker accepted it, and with only minor edits published the story.
It generated more mail than anything The New Yorker had published.
“The Lottery” kick-started Shirley’s most prolific decade of writing. During the 1950s, she published dozens of short stories in magazines and literary journals, and wrote several books, among them Life Among the Savages (a collection of stories about motherhood and her (now four) children) in 1953 and The Haunting of Hill House, a supernatural horror novel, in 1959.
In Bennington, Shirley and Stanley hosted parties for friends and literary figures, including close friend Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man. Shirley continued to write, and her literary income supported the family. Of course, she also cooked, cleaned (well, sort of — housekeeping was admittedly not her strength), wrote plays for her children and drew illustrations of everything from the family cats to herself in the morning, with wild hair and in the throes of comical domestic chores.
Her marriage wasn’t a happy one, as Stanley had several affairs and Shirley, who suffered from extreme agoraphobia, became a recluse in the early 1960s. She began to see a psychiatrist and was eventually able to leave the house, however medication and alcohol abuse, and the onset of heart disease from smoking, took their toll on her health. But she continued to write.
In 1962 she published We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a gothic mystery about domestic horror that some critics call her best novel. In 1964, she gave a series of lectures at writer’s workshops in Syracuse and the Northeast, and began writing her sixth novel. But on Aug. 8, 1965, Shirley died in her sleep at her home in North Bennington. She was 48.
In all, Shirley wrote six novels, two memoirs and more than 200 short stories. “The Lottery” is her most famous, enjoying the duality of being one of the most anthologized stories in American literature and also one of the most banned by school districts and libraries (mostly in Texas, interestingly enough).
“Jackson’s work … channels a far-reaching anxiety about the tumultuous world outside the home even as it investigates the dark secrets of domestic American life,” wrote Ruth Franklin in Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, her excellent biography.
Shirley’s writing offers readers an intimate look at the secret history of women of her era — midcentury America — and the constraints society put on them.
In 1959 Shirley Jackson’s son Laurence recorded his mother reading “The Lottery,” the only known recording of her voice. Listen to it here.