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First published in The New Yorker, as many of Jackson's stories were, "The Lottery" was an early narrative of a kind of existentialist, world-weary angst that shocked readers. Mail at the magazine was heavy with readers' reactions to the calmly objective recounting of the ritualized murder of the unlucky housewife and mother, Tessie Hutchinson. In the 1940's and the 1950's, when the story quickly became a classroom staple, few people felt it was significant that the victim of the orderly fertility process was a woman. Today, that recognition underlies much of the effect of the story.

Married to literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Shirley Jackson bore four children and tried to face their unconventional life with humor, most of the time avoiding the depression that troubled her intermittently. Much of her fiction is either purposefully unrealistic or it is focused on the darker side of family life (Hangsaman, about a schizophrenic adolescent; We Have Always Lived in the Castle,......

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