On this day, 60 years ago, The New Yorker published “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson.
People flipped…out–cancelled subscriptions, wrote bags of hate mail. The story was banned outright in South Africa and, according to Wikipedia, ranked seventeenth on Playboy’s list of books most banned by public high schools in the U.S.
This was the only Shirley Jackson story I’d read until I met Prairie, who is a huge Shirley Jackson fan. I was probably in high school when I read it last, so I re-read it a couple of years back, and it’s still an incredibly powerful story.
If you haven’t read it, you can do so here.
(via The Slog, who really should have chosen a different title for their post — there are people who might not have read the story yet, after all.)