Hate on the story "The Lottery"

   June 26 1948 was when the story "The Lottery" was published. After it was published the story got an extreme about of hate. Many people cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine were it was published. People called the story "outrageous"  "gruesome" and "utterly pointless." So many people were outraged by this story. They didn't understand why Jackson would write such a story. 

   Shortly after the story was published, a friend sent Jackson a note, saying, “Heard a man talking about a story of yours on the bus this morning. Very exciting. I wanted to tell him I knew the author, but after I heard what he was saying, I decided I’d better not.” Jackson later said that June 26, 1948 was “the last time for months I was to pick up the mail without an active feeling of panic.” The New Yorker forwarded the mail they received about her story—sometimes as many as 10 to 12 letters a day. Jackson was forced to switch to the biggest possible post office box; she could no longer make conversation with the postmaster, who wouldn’t speak to her.

   It's so sad that even her parents hated the story. Her mother wrote to her that “Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker … [I]t does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The life of Shilrey Jackson

Image
  Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco on December 14, 1916, and spent her childhood in nearby Burlingame, California, where she began writing poetry and short stories as a young teenager. Her family moved East when she was seventeen, and she attended the University of Rochester. After a year, in 1936, she withdrew and spent a year at home practicing writing, producing a minimum of a thousand words a day.   She entered Syracuse University in 1937, where she published her first story, “Janice,” and was soon appointed fiction editor of the campus humor magazine. After winning a poetry contest at Syracuse she met her future husband, critic Stanley Edgar Hyman they had four children together, and they founded a literary magazine, Spectre, with Hyman as editor. They moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, where Shirley wrote without fail every day while working her job. She began having her stories published in The New Republic and The New Yorker, and the first of ...
Read more

What Jackson's work was really about

Image
   Although it is often unclear which specific authors Jackson would draw her influence from, it was evident in her writings from an early age that her inspiration came from her view that there was a hidden dark side in everyone (“Shirley Jackson Biography”). In this way, it is better to say that her own life and her perspective influenced her more than anything.    "The Summer People", "The Lottery", " The Witch" "The Renegade", and " We Have Always Lived In The Castle" speak to the prejudice and cruelty of human beings. Jackson wanted to show everyday evil in her writings.    Her best-known novel, The Haunting of Hill House, is the quintessential haunted-house story. Published in 1959 and filmed in 1963 as The Haunting, it is a masterpiece of edgy tension and creeping terror, telling the story of a paranormal investigator and his carefully picked guests, who stay in the titular property in a bid to prove the existence of the supernat...
Read more