The Lottery
Based on Wikipedia: The Lottery
The Story That Made America Furious
On June 26, 1948, readers of The New Yorker opened their magazines to find a short story that would haunt American literature for decades. It was called "The Lottery," and within days of its publication, the magazine's office was drowning in mail. Subscriptions were being canceled. Readers were sending what can only be described as hate mail—hundreds upon hundreds of letters, arriving by the bagful.
The author, Shirley Jackson, found herself collecting ten to twelve forwarded letters every single day that summer. Out of more than three hundred letters she received, only thirteen were kind. Even her own mother wrote to scold her.
What had Jackson done to provoke such fury? She had written a story about a small American town holding a lottery. The twist—which readers discover only in the final paragraphs—is that the "winner" doesn't receive a prize. The winner is stoned to death by their neighbors.
A Very Ordinary Horror
The brilliance of "The Lottery" lies in its ordinariness. Jackson doesn't set her story in some distant, barbaric land. She places it squarely in small-town America—the kind of place with a coal merchant and a postmaster, where children pile stones while their parents chat about rain and tractors and taxes. The date is June 27th. The weather is clear and sunny. Flowers are blooming.
The town has about three hundred residents. Everyone knows everyone. The preparations for the lottery begin the night before, when Mr. Summers (the coal merchant) and Mr. Graves (the postmaster) draw up a list of all the extended families and prepare paper slips—one for each family. These slips go into an old, age-stained black wooden box that has been used for as long as anyone can remember.
On the day of the lottery, the townspeople gather in the square. There's nervous excitement in the air. First, each family head draws a slip. The Hutchinson family draws the marked one. Then each member of the Hutchinson household must draw again: Bill, his wife Tessie, and their three children.
Tessie gets the marked slip.
Her neighbors—including her own young son Davy—pick up stones and begin to throw.
The Uncomfortable Question
What disturbed readers most wasn't the violence itself. It was how normal everything seemed. How casually the townspeople accepted their annual ritual. How quickly Tessie's friends and family turned on her.
Jackson later explained what she had hoped to accomplish. She wanted to take a brutal ancient rite and set it in the present day, in her own village, to shock readers into seeing the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives. She lived in North Bennington, Vermont, and that quiet New England town was very much in her mind as she wrote.
But readers weren't ready to look in that mirror.
The letters that flooded in that first summer fell into three categories: bewilderment, speculation, and what Jackson diplomatically called "plain old-fashioned abuse." Perhaps most tellingly, many people didn't ask what the story meant. They asked where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.
Names That Mean Something
Literary scholars have spent decades unpacking "The Lottery." One of the richest veins of analysis concerns the names Jackson chose for her characters.
The victim, Tessie Hutchinson, shares her surname with Anne Hutchinson, a religious dissenter who was banished from Massachusetts in 1638 for holding beliefs the Puritan establishment deemed heretical. Anne Hutchinson was tried, excommunicated, and exiled—punished, essentially, for questioning authority. Tessie Hutchinson does the same. She challenges the lottery, protests its unfairness, questions tradition. Perhaps that rebelliousness is precisely why the lottery selects her.
Other names are equally weighted. Mr. Adams stands at the front of the crowd—Adams, as in the first man, the progenitor of humanity in the Judeo-Christian tradition. He stands beside Mrs. Graves, whose name needs no explanation. "Delacroix" means "of the cross" in French, but the villagers have vulgarized it to "Dellacroy"—a corruption of Christianity itself. And it is Mrs. Delacroix, warm and friendly at the start of the story, who will select a stone so large she has to pick it up with both hands.
Even the name "Martin" has been traced to a Middle English word meaning ape or monkey—the animal within us all, barely concealed by civilization's veneer.
An Old Proverb and Older Fears
Why do the townspeople hold the lottery at all? Old Man Warner, the eldest resident, provides the only justification: "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon."
This is an ancient bargain. Sacrifice something—or someone—to ensure the harvest. Spill blood so the crops will grow. It's a practice found in cultures around the world, from the Aztec temples to the fields of ancient Europe. Jackson takes this primal human impulse and shows it alive and well in twentieth-century America.
Some neighboring villages have already abandoned their lotteries, we learn. Rumors suggest others might follow. Old Man Warner dismisses these developments as foolishness. "Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves," he grumbles. He has participated in seventy-seven lotteries. To him, the ritual is simply what one does. It's tradition.
And tradition, Jackson suggests, can be the most dangerous thing of all.
The World Responds
The story's reception extended far beyond confused New Yorker readers. The Union of South Africa banned the story outright—an ironic response, given that some regions of Africa used stoning as an actual legal punishment. The authorities recognized themselves in Jackson's mirror and didn't like what they saw.
Over time, the tone of the letters Jackson received changed. Readers began to approach her more politely, asking earnest questions about meaning rather than demanding to know where the real lottery was held. The story entered anthologies and textbooks. It was adapted for radio, television, film, and even—in what Jackson called "one completely mystifying transformation"—a ballet.
Today, "The Lottery" is widely considered one of the most famous short stories in American literary history. It appears in countless high school and college curricula. It has been analyzed, debated, and reimagined for over seventy-five years.
What the Story Means
Scholars have found many targets for Jackson's critique. Some see a condemnation of capital punishment—the arbitrary selection of who lives and who dies, carried out with the community's full support, sanctioned by tradition even when doubt lingers. As one critic noted, we as readers feel uncomfortable watching such blind obedience, and we might make a connection when we witness modern-day executions and realize there is arbitrariness in those instances as well.
Others have drawn parallels to the military draft. "The Lottery" was written just three years after the end of World War Two, in which ten million American men were drafted and over four hundred thousand died. The story was published just two days after the Military Selective Service Act re-established the draft. The random selection of young men for potential death—sanctioned by society, accepted as necessary—was very much in the American consciousness.
Still others focus on conformity itself. The townspeople don't question the lottery because it's what they've always done. They participate because everyone participates. They throw stones because the person next to them is throwing stones. This reading took on special resonance in post-war America, as psychologists and sociologists began studying how ordinary people could be induced to commit extraordinary cruelties.
Jackson's Mother Was Wrong
Remember that scolding letter from Jackson's mother? "Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker," she wrote. "It does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?"
It's a remarkable document of parental disappointment. And it's completely wrong.
Jackson didn't need to cheer people up. She needed to wake them up. The violence of "The Lottery" isn't gratuitous—it's diagnostic. Jackson held up a mirror to small-town America and showed how easily cruelty could wear the mask of tradition, how quickly neighbors could become executioners, how readily we could convince ourselves that senseless ritual made sense.
The fact that readers were furious only proved her point. People don't get angry at stories that don't touch something true.
The Lottery in Popular Culture
The story's influence has rippled through decades of American entertainment. In a 1992 episode of The Simpsons called "Dog of Death," news anchor Kent Brockman announces that people hoping to win a state lottery jackpot have borrowed every available copy of Shirley Jackson's book The Lottery from the local library. Homer Simpson is among them. He throws the book into the fire after Brockman reveals that it contains no tips on winning—it is, rather, "a chilling tale of conformity gone mad."
The joke works because everyone knows the story, or at least knows of it. And the fact that Homer completely misses the point mirrors how Jackson's original readers missed the point too. They wanted directions to the lottery, not a lesson about human nature.
South Park drew inspiration from Jackson for a 2008 episode called "Britney's New Look." Regular Show parodied the story in 2014. The tale has been adapted into multiple films, including a 1969 short that became one of the two bestselling educational films in American history, and a 1996 television movie that was nominated for a Saturn Award.
In 2016, Jackson's own grandson, Miles Hyman, created an authorized graphic novel adaptation. His version reveals certain details earlier than Jackson's original, and the graphics, according to one reviewer, "push a little further than his grandmother's words did."
The Stones We Gather
The story opens with children gathering stones. It's an image of innocence—kids playing, collecting things, as kids do. Only later do we understand what those stones are for.
That detail contains the whole horror of "The Lottery" in miniature. The children have been taught to participate in murder. They don't question it. They don't resist. They gather their stones as naturally as they would gather wildflowers. The community has passed its traditions down so thoroughly that even its youngest members are ready to throw.
This is what disturbed readers in 1948, and it's what disturbs readers still. Not that such violence could happen in some distant, primitive place. But that it could happen here. That we could be the ones gathering stones. That we might already be doing so, metaphorically speaking, every time we participate in cruelties we've been taught to accept.
Jackson never wrote a sequel or a prequel. She never explained how the lottery began or what happened after Tessie died. The story ends with stones in the air. What happens next is left to us—the readers, the citizens, the inheritors of a thousand unexamined traditions.
Maybe next year there won't be a lottery, as one radio adaptation put it. It's up to all of us.
Chances are, there will be, though.