The Lottery (1948)¶

Author: Shirley Jackson Type: Short story · Literary fiction / horror Published: 1948, The New Yorker Copyright: Under copyright — use excerpts only Era/Period: WH Era 4 / USH Unit 4–5 — conformity, tradition, and violence after WWII ELA Standards: 9-10.R.4 · 9-10.R.8 · 9-10.W.4

What This Text Is About¶

On a clear summer morning, the villagers of a small town gather in the square for the annual lottery. Children collect stones. The black box is brought out — old, splintered, faded. Families draw slips of paper. The Hutchinson family draws the marked slip. Then Tessie Hutchinson draws again among the five family members, and she draws the mark. The villagers — her neighbors, her friends — pick up the stones the children collected. The lottery winner is stoned to death. The village has always done it this way. No one questions it. No one stops it.

Read It¶

Under copyright — excerpt for educational use.

The story opens with ordinary village life before the lottery begins:

"The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner."

And Tessie Hutchinson's final moment:

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

— Shirley Jackson, The New Yorker, June 26, 1948

Why This Text Matters¶

"The Lottery" was published on June 26, 1948 — three years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, two years after the Nuremberg trials. Shirley Jackson had been thinking about how ordinary communities commit atrocities. Her story is not about monsters. It is about neighbors, children, a black box, and a tradition so old that no one remembers why it started. Old Man Warner has participated in 77 lotteries. When someone mentions that other villages have stopped holding the lottery, he calls it "pack of crazy fools." His only argument: "There's always been a lottery."

The story generated more letters to The New Yorker than any piece the magazine had ever published — most of them angry, confused, or disturbed. Readers wanted to know: where is this village? Is this real? Jackson received hate mail. People did not want to believe she was describing something that happens everywhere, all the time, in ordinary communities that have simply stopped asking why they do what they do.

The story's technique is as important as its argument. Jackson writes the opening in the cheerful register of a community event — children, sunshine, flowers. The horror arrives in the final paragraph and is over in two sentences. The contrast between the tone of the opening and the reality of the ending is the story's mechanism. Everything was always going to end this way. The reader just didn't know it until the last page.

ELA Standards Connection¶

Standard	Connection
9-10.R.4	Theme: the violence of unquestioned tradition; how communities enforce norms that harm their own members; the gap between a ritual's original purpose and its perpetuation long after that purpose is forgotten
9-10.R.8	Tone as a narrative technique — Jackson's cheerful, ordinary opening against the horror of the ending; how the story withholds information (we don't know what the lottery is until the last pages); foreshadowing in the children's stone-collecting
9-10.W.4	Argue: Is the village responsible for what it does to Tessie Hutchinson? Use the story and at least one piece of historical evidence about how communities participate in institutional violence. Consider: does "tradition" remove moral responsibility?

WH Era 4 / post-WWII context: Jackson wrote in the immediate shadow of the Holocaust. The Nuremberg trials (1945–46) had just grappled with the question: how do ordinary people participate in mass atrocities? Hannah Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil" — the idea that great evil is often committed by ordinary people following orders and tradition — was being formulated in exactly this period. "The Lottery" is the literary version of that argument.

USH Unit 5 — Cold War conformity: The story also speaks to the conformity of 1950s American culture — the pressure to fit in, the danger of questioning what everyone else accepts. The story was published in 1948, two years before McCarthyism began. Villagers who question the lottery are looked at with suspicion.

Milgram experiments (1961): Stanley Milgram's famous obedience studies showed that ordinary Americans would administer (what they believed to be) severe electric shocks to strangers when instructed to by an authority figure. The lottery has no authority figure — the community enforces itself. Jackson's vision is darker than Milgram's: you don't even need an authority. Tradition is enough.

Key Vocabulary¶

Paraphernalia — equipment, materials, stuff; "the paraphernalia of the lottery" — the black box, the slips of paper; using a neutral word for something sinister
Perfunctory — carried out without care, as a routine; "a perfunctory, tuneless chant" — the lottery procedures done by rote, without engagement
Interminably — endlessly, without stopping; the children's summer seems to go on forever at the opening — contrast with how quickly the lottery ends
Lottery — a drawing by chance; the word itself is neutral, even positive (you win a lottery); Jackson uses the word's ordinary meaning against us
Tradition — customs handed down through generations; the story's central question is when tradition becomes an excuse for harm

Studio Ideas¶

When does tradition become harmful? — Research one tradition or institution that was once accepted as normal and is now recognized as harmful (examples: debtor's prison, public execution, child labor, school segregation). What caused people to question it? What changed? Use "The Lottery" as a framework for thinking about how communities maintain harmful traditions.
The Nuremberg defense — At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi defendants argued they were following orders and tradition. The tribunal rejected this as a defense. Does tradition remove moral responsibility? Use Jackson's story and the Nuremberg trials as evidence in a W.4 argument.
Bystanders and participants — Most villagers in "The Lottery" are neither the person who draws the mark nor the person who called for the lottery. They are bystanders who become participants. Research the concept of bystander effect and apply it to a historical case of community violence. What does Jackson's story teach about how bystanders become perpetrators?

Pairs With¶

Animal Farm — Orwell — both stories are about how communities enforce conformity and how power maintains itself through tradition and fear
Fahrenheit 451 — Bradbury — a society that destroys what threatens it; how communities organize themselves around elimination of the different
Harrison Bergeron — Vonnegut — conformity enforced through different means; the community as the instrument of its own oppression
UN Declaration of Human Rights — written the same year as "The Lottery"; the UDHR is the world's attempt to name what the lottery does and say it must stop

Why This Is Relevant Today?¶

"The Lottery" is often taught in schools — and sometimes challenged or banned by the communities it describes. Parents have objected to it in Fargo, in rural Minnesota, in towns across the country, often using arguments that echo Old Man Warner: this isn't how things work here, we don't do things like that. The discomfort the story produces is, to some degree, evidence for its argument. Communities that are most disturbed by the story may be the ones with the most invested in not questioning their own traditions.

Short Story Collection · SDA Commons Reading Library · South High School