Shirley Jackson

Born on December 14, 1916, in San Francisco, California, Shirley Hardie Jackson grew up in an affluent family with a mother who never ceased reminding her that she was overweight and disappointing. She attended Syracuse University, where she founded the literary magazine Spectre and met Stanley Edgar Hyman, a brash literary critic she married in 1940. They moved to New York City and both began contributing to The New Yorker, Jackson as a fiction writer, Hyman as a staff writer. In 1945 they settled in North Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman joined the faculty of Bennington College, and Jackson raised four children while producing a body of work that would redefine American horror. On June 26, 1948, The New Yorker published "The Lottery," a story about a village that stones one of its members to death each year. The magazine received more mail about it than about anything it had ever printed, most of it hostile, much of it canceling subscriptions. Her novels The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) combined psychological terror with social satire of a precision that Stephen King has called unsurpassed. She also wrote two wickedly funny memoirs about domestic life, Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). She suffered from anxiety, agoraphobia, and depression, and her health deteriorated through the early 1960s. She died in her sleep on August 8, 1965, at forty-eight, of heart failure.

One June morning in 1948, wheeling her daughter home up the North Bennington hill, she had the whole of The Lottery in her head. She put the groceries away, sat down, and wrote the story in under two hours, changing almost nothing. It ran in The New Yorker within the month.