Category: Shirley Jackson

Throughout the world People do things for various reasons. Belief, survival, religion, peer pressure, culture or tradition, are some of the reasons the people carry out things. People have various traditions such as Christmas, Easter Day and so forth. Some people have strange or out of the ordinary traditions. The two short stories The Lottery…

When Shirley Jackson’s chilling story ‘The Lottery’ was first published in 1948 in The New Yorker, it generated more letters than any work of fiction the magazine had ever published. Readers were furious, disgusted, occasionally curious, and almost uniformly bewildered. The public outcry over the story can be attributed, in part, to The New Yorker’s…

The village lottery culminates in a violent murder each year, a bizarre ritual that suggests how dangerous tradition can be when people follow it blindly. Before we know what kind of lottery theyre conducting, the villagers and their preparations seem harmless, even quaint: theyve appointed a rather pathetic man to lead the lottery, and children…