The startling central premise of The Lottery came to Shirley Jackson while she was out running errands one morning. Back at home, so the text’s origin story goes, she popped her toddler into the playpen, put away the shopping, typed out the story and sent it off to her agent (Franklin 2016, p. 3). Soon after, this classic American horror story appeared in the prestigious literary magazine The New Yorker, in June 1948, and made the young writer famous overnight.
On the surface a deceptively simple tale about a group of townsfolk gathering for a traditional ceremony, The Lottery’s stunning conclusion created a firestorm. The New Yorker was deluged with angry letters of complaint from shocked and puzzled readers, with some wondering if the printers had mistakenly left out the final paragraph. Ultimately, however, as Jackson’s biographer Ruth Franklin comments, most did:
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