A torrent of mail arrived at The New Yorker in the wake of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery”—the most the magazine had ever received in response to a work of fiction.
” was first published, in the June 26, 1948, issue of this magazine, Miriam Friend was a young mother living in Roselle, New Jersey, with her husband, a chemical engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project. An exact contemporary of Jackson’s—both women were born in 1916—she had recently left her job as a corporate librarian to care for her infant son, and she was a faithful reader of.
As Jackson’s biographer, I’ve pored over more than a hundred of these letters, which she kept in a giant scrapbook that is now in her archive at the Library of Congress. There were indeed some cancelled subscriptions, as well as a fair share of name-calling—Jackson was said to be “perverted” and “gratuitously disagreeable,” with “incredibly bad taste.” But the vast majority of the letter writers were not angry or abusive but simply confused.
Among those who were confused about Jackson’s intentions was Alfred 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.
The largest proportion of the respondents admired “The Lottery,” even if they did not believe they understood it. Arthur Wang, then at Viking Press and later to found the publishing house Hill and Wang, wrote to Hyman: “We discussed the story for almost an hour the other evening. It’s damned good but I haven’t met anyone who is sure that they . . . know what it’s about.” Nelson Olmsted, a producer at NBC, wrote to Jackson that he was interested in using the story on television.
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