The Lottery
Famous and controversial short story by Shirley Jackson, in which the inhabitants of a small town in the United States gather for their annual lottery, the nature of which is not revealed until the end.
Plot summary
The story builds its sense of horror from the contrast with the everyday nature of the small town, a sort of EveryTown, and the horrific nature of the actual lottery. Tessie Hutchinson, the lottery's "winner", is stoned to death by the entire community.
Commentary
"The Lottery" was initially greeted by shock and outrage -- large numbers of people cancelled their subscriptions to the New Yorker in response to the story, and it was banned in South Africa, and banned in various schools and libraries elsewhere. Over the ensuingn decades, however, the story has been embraced as a work of literature by academics, and is now regularly read and taught in secondary schools.
The work has been read as a critique of social conformity, tradition and ritual (especially religious and non-rational tradition), human violence and barbarity, small towns, demonizing the other (scapegoating), hypocrisy, etc. Ursula K. Le Guin's short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", is perhaps the only other SF short story to achieve such a level of critical recognition; the stories, however, take radically different approaches to treating the same subject matter (scapegoating; human evil; social conformity).
Publications
- June 28, 1948 issue of The New Yorker.
- many many reprints in various anthologies
Adaptations and intertextuality
- 1951 March 14, NBC Short story radio adaptation
- Ellen M. Violett TV adaptation, on "Cameo Theatre" (1950-55)
- 1953 ballet (composer, choreographer, productions, year?)
- Larry Yust, "The Lottery" (1969) film adaptation with Ed Begley, Jr. (an educational film with commentary by James Durbin)
- Daniel Sackheim (director) and Anthony Spinner (adapter), "The Lottery" (1996 feature length TV movie) with Keri Russell, Dan Cortese, Veronica Cartwright, etc.
- 1996 music video for "Man That You Fear" song by Marilyn Manson (dir. by ??)
- Augustin Kennady (dir.) "The Lottery" (2006 11-minute short film)
- the Acting Company's one-act play adaptation, directed by Douglas Mercer & adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher (http://www.theactingcompany.org/education/bobhopeseries.html)
- Opera (composer, librettist, year, productions?)