“The Lottery” Letters

The villagers of a small town gather together in the square on June 27, a beautiful day, for the town lottery. In other towns, the lottery takes longer, but there are only 300 people in this village, so the lottery takes only two hours. Village children, who have just finished school for the summer, run around collecting stones. They put the stones in their pockets and make a pile in the square. He arrives in the square with the black box, followed by Mr. Graves, the postmaster. Old Man Warner, was born. Mr. Summers always suggests that they make a new box because the current one is shabby, but no one wants to fool around with tradition. Summers mixes up the slips of paper in the box. He and Mr. Graves made the papers the night before and then locked up the box at Mr. Summers’s coal company. Before the lottery can begin, they make a list of all the families and households in the village. She joins her husband and children at the front of the crowd, and people joke about her late arrival. Mr. Summers asks whether anyone is absent, and the crowd responds that Dunbar isn’t there. Word quickly gets around that Bill Hutchinson has “got it.” Tessie argues that it wasn’t fair because Bill didn’t have enough time to select a paper. Mr. Summers asks whether there are any other households in the Hutchinson family, and Bill says no, because his married daughter draws with her husband’s family. Mr. Summers asks how many kids Bill has, and he answers that he has three. Tessie says it’s not fair and is hit in the head with a stone. Your answer is probably "no," but Shirley Jackson disagrees. She thinks you – and anyone and everyone – would race off that bridge if your community decided it was necessary. According to her, while individuals may be great, a group of people is another animal. Lottery" is like the world's creepiest public service announcement against peer pressure. Similar to those warnings about drinking or smoking – except Jackson is warning against unthinkingly follow along with a group. L. Kroeber, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “If Shirley Jackson’s intent was to symbolize into complete mystification, and at the same time be gratuitously disagreeable, she certainly succeeded,” he wrote. Lakewood, Ohio, suspected that the editorial staff had become “tools of Stalin.” Another reader wondered if it was a publicity stunt, while several more speculated that a concluding paragraph must have been accidentally cut by the printer. Others complained that the story had traumatized them so much that they had been unable to open any issues of the magazine since. June (the 27th, to be exact), villagers gather in the square to participate in a lottery run by Mr. Summers, who officiates at all the big civic events. The children arrive first and begin collecting stones until their parents call them to order. Mr. Summers places five slips of paper into the box and each member of the family draws. Tess (Mrs. Hutchinson) draws a slip of paper with a big black dot in the center. Not good. The villagers advance on her, and it becomes crystal clear what the prize for the lottery really is: a stoning. Lottery," the inhabitants of a New England town gather in the town square to draw lots. Whoever draws a slip of paper with a black dot on it will be killed. There is an air of festivity among them, especially the children. Finally the lottery begins: Heads of families step forward and draw small paper slips from the black box that Mr. Summers keeps for the occasion. A desperate woman now, Tessie entreats the crowd to go through the ritual again, doing things fairly. The invisible and anonymous girl, about twelve years old like her friend Nancy Hutchinson, has to whisper because she is afraid of voicing anything which might seem to reflect unfavorably on the whole principle of this benighted lottery. But young people like her may someday raise their voices and demand that the town put an end to this superstitious idiocy. This is quite obviously a patriarchal society. The men run the lottery and the men draw the slips for their families. The first drawing is to select the household of the person to be sacrificed. There are about three hundred people present, as the narrator says, but they probably belong to not more than a hundred households at most--possibly as few as around sixty or seventy. So there would be one slip with a black mark in the black box and fewer than a hundred other slips that were completely blank. Straus & Giroux (Hill and Wang) were excited about a graphic adaptation of the “The Lottery,” and their enthusiasm was a definite “plus” since I had worked with them in the past and knew the high quality of the books they produce. We’re able to observe the folding of these curious pieces of paper that are going to be so important moving forward. We’re left with a gut feeling that this strange marked paper, visible for an instant and then hidden away in the black box in the first scene of the graphic adaptation, will inevitably have some sinister impact on the story as events unfold. Any analogies would obviously be imperfect at best and the last thing I’d want to do would be to bend the story’s meaning to address current events. As my grandmother might have said, “The Lottery” is just a story. June day in 1948, while taking a long walk, that darkness emerged. Several months pregnant and pushing a baby carriage loaded with groceries, Jackson found the trip more difficult than she'd anticipated. The day is "clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day," and the people are gathering the square, children first. Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones," we're told -the first vague note of menace in the story. Soon, the adults arrive, joking, gossiping, and "speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes." This is Everytown, USA, Jackson implies.

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