![]() ![]() ![]() She remembered later that the idea “had come to me while I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller-it was, as I say, a warm morning, and the hill was steep, and beside my daughter, the stroller held the day’s groceries-and perhaps the effort of that last 50 yards up the hill put an edge to the story.” Jackson, who lived in North Bennington, Vermont, wrote the story on a warm June day after running errands. Writing “The Lottery” was a snap for Shirley Jackson. “It was not my first published story, nor my last,” the writer recounted in a 1960 lecture, “but I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote and published, there would still be people who would not forget my name.” Here are a few things you might not have known about “The Lottery.” 1. Though now a classic, the story-about a small New England village whose residents follow an annual rite in which they draw slips of paper until, finally, one of them is selected to be stoned to death-caused an immediate outcry when it was published, and gave Jackson literary notoriety. ![]() But inside was a story that editors at the magazine would, more than half a century later, call “ perhaps the most controversial short story The New Yorker has ever published”: Shirley Jackson’s “ The Lottery.” ![]() There was nothing to outwardly indicate that it would be any different, or any more special, than any other issue. On June 26, 1948, subscribers to The New Yorker received a new issue of the magazine in the mail. ![]()
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