“The Lottery” By Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson Born December 14, 1916 Died August 8, 1965 Mostly known for “The Lottery” Published June 26, 1948 Married to Stanley Edgar Hyman Famous author Infidelity!!

Some Facts... California Girl Christian Science Flunked out of college Her parents DIDN’T attend her wedding She wrote “The Lottery” in a single morning People thought “The Lottery” was factual She had a HUGE library of witchcraft books Born & raised in California until her senior year of high school when her father was transferred to Rochester, NY. Spent most of her adult life in North Bennington Vermont. In fact, most critics believe that to be the setting of her short story “The Lottery.” Jackson’s maternal grandmother, who lived with the Jacksons while she was growing up, was a Christian Science faith healer. Jackson would later angrily recall her mother and grandmother praying over her little brother’s broken arm rather than taking him to a hospital. Still, she listed “Christian Science” as her own religion on her college applications. Kicked out of the University of Rochester after her sophomore year. Jackson spent far more time hanging out in cafés with her best friend, a sophisticated French exchange student, than studying. She may also have suffered a serious depression. After taking a year off, she enrolled at Syracuse, where she met Stanley Edgar Hyman, her future husband. They graduated in 1940. Neither did Hyman’s. Though he declared himself a “militant atheist” as a teenager, he was brought up in a traditional Jewish household, and his parents didn’t approve of him marrying outside the faith. The Jacksons, for their part, were more than a little anti-Semitic. A lot of myths have arisen around Jackson’s writing of “The Lottery,” some of them spread by Jackson herself. In a lecture about its creation that was later published as “Biography of a Story,” she said that The New Yorker had asked her to make only a single change—the date on which the lottery was held—and that the magazine published the story just a few weeks after she submitted it. Neither was true. But all accounts agree that Jackson had the idea for the story while she was out grocery shopping, came home, and wrote it while her two-year-old daughter played in a playpen. She was finished by the time her son came home from kindergarten for lunch. Jackson received hundreds of letters and was most alarmed by the letters from people who wanted to know where such lotteries were still held and whether they could watch. But the fact that some readers believed the story to be true isn’t as bizarre as it now seems, since The New Yorker at the time didn’t designate articles as fact or fiction, and many of the humorous essays were understood to fall somewhere in between. Jackson became interested in witchcraft during her early years in college and continued studying it for the rest of her life. She liked to joke about her skills and even spread the rumor that she had made publisher Alfred A. Knopf—who was involved in a contract dispute with Hyman—break his leg while skiing in Vermont. (She had to wait for Knopf to leave New York, she said, because she couldn’t practice black magic across state lines.) She also read Tarot cards for friends and family. The jacket copy of The Road Through the Wall described her as “perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch.”

Some interesting facts about "The Lottery" ** Some of these “facts” are disputed. There’s no real concrete details about this wildly popular short story, but many of these line up with other critics. **