“Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”

Regarding her story The Lottery, in the San Francisco Chronicle (22 July 1948)

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Shirley Jackson 49
novelist, short story writer 1916–1965

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