The Lottery

No. It’s a short story, and most people finish it in one sitting. The sentences are plain; the weight is in what nobody in the village says out loud.

Yes. The New Yorker, where the story first appeared on 26 June 1948, keeps it in its online archive. If you want it on paper, it’s in The Lottery and Other Stories.

The Lottery and Other Stories (FSG Classics, ISBN 978-0374529536). It has the story plus 24 others, and it’s the only collection of her stories published during Shirley Jackson’s lifetime.

A small village of about three hundred people gathers in its square on a sunny June morning for a yearly drawing that everyone takes part in. The story follows the preparations and the drawing step by step, and only at the very end reveals what the person chosen receives: they are stoned to death by their neighbours.

Shirley Jackson, an American writer best known for this story and for The Haunting of Hill House (1959). She was born in San Francisco in 1916, grew up in California, and lived most of her adult life in North Bennington, Vermont, where she died in 1965.

The main theme is the danger of following tradition without asking why. The villagers no longer remember what the lottery was for, but they keep it going because it has always been done. Closely linked themes are conformity, scapegoating and the violence that ordinary people will take part in when everyone around them does.

Jackson wrote it in 1948, and it was first published in The New Yorker on 26 June 1948. It appeared in book form in 1949, in her collection The Lottery, now sold as The Lottery and Other Stories.

In a small, unnamed farming village, in the square between the post office and the bank, on the morning of 27 June. The year is never given, but the details point to a rural American town around the time the story was written.

Nobody in the story really knows anymore. Old Man Warner repeats an old saying that ties the lottery to a good harvest, but most of the original ritual has been forgotten. The village keeps it going out of habit, which is the point of the story.

Tessie Hutchinson, who arrives late and protests; her husband Bill and their children; Mr. Summers, who runs the lottery; Mr. Graves, the postmaster who helps him; Old Man Warner, the oldest man in the village; and neighbours such as Mrs. Delacroix and Mrs. Dunbar. Tessie is usually seen as the protagonist.

Mr. Summers runs the coal business and organises the village’s civic events, including the lottery. He is cheerful and friendly, and his sunny name fits the June morning. That is what makes him unsettling: the ritual is led by the most ordinary, likeable man in town.

Tessie Hutchinson. Her family is drawn first, then she draws the slip with the black spot, and the villagers, her own family among them, stone her to death.

The moment Tessie’s slip is shown to the crowd and it carries the black spot. Everything after that happens in a few lines, which is why the ending hits so hard.

The central conflict is the individual against society and tradition. Tessie objects only once she is chosen, and her protest is about the fairness of the drawing, not about the custom itself.

In a reply to readers in the San Francisco Chronicle in July 1948, she said she had set an ancient, brutal rite in the present and in her own village to shock readers into seeing the pointless violence and cruelty in their own lives.

Her husband Clyde has a broken leg and cannot come, and her son is not yet old enough to draw for the family, so she draws in his place.

The box is old, splintered and faded, and every year there is talk of making a new one, but nobody does. The villagers do not want to upset even that much of the tradition, so the box stands for a custom kept going long after anyone remembers what it was for.

The oldest man in the village, who has taken part in the lottery seventy-seven times, stands for blind loyalty to tradition. He scorns the towns that have given the lottery up and warns that dropping it would send people back to living in caves.

It is told in the third person by an objective narrator who reports what people do and say without entering anyone’s thoughts. That calm, matter-of-fact tone is what builds the tension: nothing in the telling warns you what is coming.

No. The village is invented. Jackson lived in North Bennington, Vermont, and said she had set the ancient rite in the present and in her own village, to bring it close to her readers.

No. The story is still under copyright. You can read it for free in The New Yorker’s online archive, or in The Lottery and Other Stories.

The Union of South Africa banned the story. In the United States it drew the most mail The New Yorker had ever received for a work of fiction, and some readers cancelled their subscriptions.

It’s a short story, usually read as literary fiction with elements of horror. It’s often taught as a story about conformity and the danger of following tradition without question.

Short enough to read in one sitting. In print it takes up only a handful of pages, which is part of why the ending lands so hard.