19481776 Club
The New Yorker prints Jackson's 'The Lottery'; the mailroom fills with fury
More than 300 letters pour in after Harold Ross runs the story of a village that stones one of its own, and Jackson says only thirteen of them are kind.
In the summer of 1948, most New Yorker fiction was urbane, wry, and safe. What Shirley Jackson submitted from her home in North Bennington, Vermont, was none of those things. On June 26, editor Harold Ross ran "The Lottery" — a story about a small American village that stones one of its own residents to death in an annual ritual — and the magazine's mailroom was promptly overwhelmed with more than 300 letters, the majority of them outraged. Jackson later said only thirteen of those letters were kind…
