The Lottery (short story)

The Lottery is a short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson, first published in The New Yorker on 26 June 1948. It describes a small, ordinary American village of around three hundred residents gathering in the square for its annual lottery, a communal tradition said to ensure a good harvest, and follows the villagers' calm, almost bureaucratic preparations and the drawing of folded slips of paper from an old black box. Jackson withholds the true nature of the ritual until its final lines, when the story reveals that the winner of the lottery, chosen essentially at random, is stoned to death by the rest of the community, including her own family. The story provoked an extraordinary public reaction on publication, drawing what The New Yorker described as the most mail it had ever received over a single work of fiction, with Jackson herself receiving as many as ten hostile letters a day that summer, and it was banned outright in the Union of South Africa. Despite, or because of, that hostile initial reception, The Lottery has since become one of the most widely anthologized and studied short stories in American literature, read as an unsettling parable about blind conformity, inherited ritual violence, and ordinary people's complicity in cruelty.