When Shirley Jackson published her short story “The Lottery” in 1948, she received over 300 letters from shocked and confused readers. Many of the readers were outraged by the representation of the dark aspect of human nature set in a bucolic American village. It was inconceivable, they argued, that people in civilized societies would act in such an inhuman and senseless way. Jackson herself found it difficult to explain exactly what she hoped to communicate with this story - so we look forward to hearing your ideas about “The Lottery” and three other short stories by Jackson ("Mrs Spencer and the Oberons", "The Tooth" and "The Daemon Lover") when we see each other in April!

Shirley Jackson was born in California in 1916. When her short story, “The Lottery”, was first published in the New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the most iconic American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. In addition to her dark, brilliant novels, she wrote lightly fictionalized magazine pieces about family life with her four children and her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Shirley Jackson died in 1965.

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