Brief Summary

"The Lottery" tells a story of a small American town which on the surface appears to be the home to roughly 300 average Americans. The town is readying itself for a ritual known only to the reader as "the lottery". The story begins on the clear and sunny morning of June 27th, however the mood of its residents is one of a strange, eerie nervousness. Children gather stones in hopes of a good harvest in the coming year, and the town collects around a small black box. In the first round of the lottery, the head of each household draws a slip of paper from the black box, followed by the second round where each family member draws a slip. After, each person checks their paper to see who's carries a black dot at the center. Tessie, a woman who arrives late to the lottery discovers that her paper bears the black dot, and such 'wins' the lottery. For her prize, Tessie is then stoned to death by the town.

Tuesday

An interview with Shirley Jackson

After talking to Michael Griffith about "Hooper Gets a Perm" and "Zugzwang", I feel like it would be extremely interesting to ask Shirley Jackson about her experiences as a writer and what elements of herself went into her work. However, seeing as she is dead this is not possible. It's very interesting to read that when her work was published, there was such a public outrage demanding to know where this town featured in "The Lottery" was located, and why they allowed this yearly tradition. You almost have to ask yourself, if this work was fiction, what part of Shirley Jackson could conjure up such a dark story? For Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Harcraft's Twentieth Century Authors (1954), she wrote:
"I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains, naturally, no pertinent facts. I was born in San Francisco in 1919 and spent most of my early life in California. I was married in 1940 to Stanley Edgar Hyman, critic and numismatist, and we live in Vermont, in a quiet rural community with fine scenery and comfortably far away from city life. Our major exports are books and children, both of which we produce in abundance. The children are Laurence, Joanne, Sarah and Barry: my books include three novels, The Road Through The Wall, Hangsaman, The Bird's NestThe Lottery. Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children."
Jackson was herself, a housewife. So where does this side emerge from a typical housewife? Her husband, Stanley Hyman, insisted that "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 may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as evidenced 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."

All in all, I think a conversation with Mrs. Jackson would be an interesting one at the very least.

All quotes taken from here.
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