The Lottery

"The Lottery" is a short story by Shirley Jackson that was first published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948. The story describes a fictional small American community that observes an annual tradition known as "the lottery", which is intended to ensure a good harvest and purge the town of bad omens. The lottery, its preparations, and its execution are all described in detail, though it is not revealed until the end what actually happens to the person selected by the random lottery: the selected member of the community is stoned to death by the other townspeople.
Jackson and The New Yorker were both surprised by the initial negative response from readers; subscriptions were canceled and large amounts of hate mail were sent throughout the summer of its first publication, with Jackson receiving at least 10 letters per day. The Union of South Africa banned the story because some parts of Africa still used stoning as a punishment.
The story has been dramatized several times, including as a radio drama, film, and graphic novel. It has been subjected to considerable sociological and literary analysis and has been described as one of the most famous short stories in the history of American literature.
Details of contemporary small-town American life are embroidered upon a description of an annual rite known as "the lottery". In a small, unnamed village of about 300 residents, the locals are in an excited yet nervous mood on June 27. Children pile up stones as the adults assemble for their annual event, practiced to ensure a good harvest; Old Man Warner quotes an old proverb, "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon." However, some nearby villages have already discontinued the lottery, and rumors are spreading that others are considering doing the same. Some in the village respond that the lottery has always been conducted and should continue every year henceforth.
The lottery preparations start the night before, with coal merchant Mr. Summers and postmaster Mr. Graves drawing up a list of all the extended families in town and preparing one paper slip per family. The slips are folded and placed in an age-stained black wooden box which is stored in a safe at Mr. Summers' office until the lottery is scheduled to begin.
The initial drawing takes place to choose one family. There is a sense of relief in those not chosen and in one case a family member is sent to pass word to their injured father that their family was not picked. Bill Hutchinson draws the only marked slip in the box, and his wife Tessie complains that he was rushed into making his choice. Since their family consists of only one household, the second drawing to choose a household is skipped.
For the final drawing, one slip is placed in the box for each member of the Hutchinson household: Bill, Tessie, and each of their three children. Each of the five draws a slip, and Tessie gets the marked one. The townspeople, including Tessie's young son Davy, pick up the gathered stones and begin throwing them at her as Tessie screams about the unfairness of the lottery.
The New Yorker received a "torrent of letters" inquiring about the story, "the most mail the magazine had ever received in response to a work of fiction". Many readers demanded an explanation of the situation in the story, and a month after the initial publication, Jackson responded in the San Francisco Chronicle (July 22, 1948):
Jackson lived in North Bennington, Vermont, and her comment reveals that she had Bennington in mind when she wrote "The Lottery". In a 1960 lecture (printed in her 1968 collection Come Along with Me) she recalled the hate mail she received in 1948:
The New Yorker kept no records of the phone calls, but letters addressed to Jackson were forwarded to her. That summer she regularly took home 10 to 12 forwarded letters each day. She also received weekly packages from The New Yorker containing letters and questions addressed to the magazine or editor Harold Ross, plus carbon copies of the magazine's responses mailed to letter writers.
Helen E. Nebeker's essay "'The Lottery': Symbolic Tour de Force" in American Literature (March 1974) claims that every major name in the story has a special significance.
Fritz Oehlschlaeger, in "The Stoning of Mistress Hutchinson: Meaning and Context in 'The Lottery'" (Essays in Literature, 1988), wrote:
The 1992 Simpsons episode "Dog of Death" features a scene referring to "The Lottery". During the peak of the lottery fever in Springfield, news anchor Kent Brockman announces on television that people hoping to get tips on how to win the jackpot have borrowed every available copy of Shirley Jackson's book The Lottery at the local library. One of them is Homer, who throws the book into the fire after Brockman reveals that "Of course, the book does not contain any hints on how to win the lottery. It is, rather, a chilling tale of conformity gone mad." In her book Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, Bernice Murphy comments that this scene displays some of the most contradictory things about Jackson: "It says a lot about the visibility of Jackson's most notorious tale that more than 50 years after its initial creation it is still famous enough to warrant a mention in the world's most famous sitcom. The fact that Springfield's citizenry also miss the point of Jackson's story completely ... can perhaps be seen as an indication of a more general misrepresentation of Jackson and her work."
In "Arbitrary Condemnation and Sanctioned Violence in Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery'" (December 2004), Patrick J. Shields suggests there is a connection between the death penalty and "The Lottery" when writing:
Others have made comparisons between the lottery and the military draft, whereby young men aged 18–25 were selected at random for military service by the Selective Service System. The story was written just three years after the end of World War II, in which ten million American men were drafted and over 400,000 died, and was published just two days after the enactment of the Military Selective Service Act, which re-established the draft.
In addition to numerous reprints in magazines, anthologies, and textbooks as well as comic adaptation, "The Lottery" has been adapted for radio, live television, a 1953 ballet, films in 1969 and 1997, a TV movie, an opera, and a one-act play by Thomas Martin.
A radio adaptation by NBC was broadcast March 14, 1951, as an episode of the anthology series NBC Presents: Short Story. Writer Ernest Kinoy expanded the plot to include scenes at various characters' homes before the lottery and a conversation between Bill and Tessie Hutchinson (Bill suggests leaving town before the lottery happens, but Tessie refuses because she wants to go shopping at Floyd Summers's store after the lottery is over). Kinoy deleted certain characters, including two of the Hutchinsons' three children, and added at least one character, John Gunderson, a schoolteacher who publicly objects to the lottery being held, and at first refuses to draw. Finally, Kinoy included an ending scene describing the townspeople's post-lottery activities and an afterword, in which the narrator suggested: "Next year, maybe there won't be a Lottery. It's up to all of us. Chances are, there will be, though." The production was directed by Andrew C. Love.
Ellen M. Violett wrote the first television adaptation, seen on Albert McCleery's Cameo Theatre (1950–1955).
The story served as the inspiration for the 2008 South Park episode "Britney's New Look".
The story was also parodied in the 2014 Regular Show episode "Terror Tales of the Park IV", in the segment "The Hole" (a.k.a. "The Wonderful Adventure of the Mysterious Hole in the Park"), described as "reimagining some classic literature".
Larry Yust's short film The Lottery (1969), produced as part of Encyclopædia Britannica's "Short Story Showcase" series, was ranked by the Academic Film Archive "as one of the two bestselling educational films ever". It has an accompanying ten-minute commentary film Discussion of "The Lottery" by University of Southern California English professor James Durbin. Featuring Ed Begley Jr. as Jack Watson in his third film, Yust's adaptation has an atmosphere of naturalism and small-town authenticity with its shots of pickup trucks in Fellows, California, and the townspeople of Fellows and Taft, California.
Anthony Spinner's feature-length TV film The Lottery, which premiered September 29, 1996, on NBC, expands upon the original Shirley Jackson story. It was nominated for a 1997 Saturn Award for Best Single Genre Television Presentation.
In 2016, Miles Hyman, a grandson of Jackson, created a graphic novel adaption titled Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery": The Authorized Graphic Adaptation. His version abbreviates the wording of the source work and relies on graphics to portray other aspects of the narrative. He also wrote his own introduction. Alyson Ward of the Houston Chronicle wrote the graphics "push a little further than his grandmother's words did", though she stated Hyman's version reveals details of the story earlier than in the original work.