Shirley Jackson (1919-1965) was born in San Francisco, California, her mother a housewife and her father an employee of a lithographing company. Most of her early life was spent in Burlingame, California, which she later used as the setting for her first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948). As a child she was interested in writing; she won a poetry prize at age twelve, and in high school she began keeping a diary to record her writing progress. After high school she briefly attended the University of Rochester but left because of an attack of the mental depression that was to recur periodically in her later years. She recovered her health by living quietly at home and writing, conscientiously turning out a thousand works of prose a day.
             In 1937 she entered Syracuse University, where she published stories in the student literary magazine. There she met Stanley Edgar Human, who was to become a noted literary critic. They were married in 1940, the year she received her degree. They had four children while both continued active literary careers, settling to raise their family in a large Victorian house in Vermont, where Hyman taught literature at Bennington College.
             The author's story, "The Lottery" portrays an average New England village with "average" citizens engaged in a deadly rite, the annual selection of a sacrificial victim by means of a public lottery, and does so quite deviously: not until well along in the story do we suspect that the "winner" will be stoned to death by the rest of the villagers.
             "The Lottery" reveals two general critical attitudes: first, that it is about man's ineffaceable primitive aggressiveness' or what we may say is man's human tendency to violence. We cannot remove the fact that man by nature is sinful and will always and forever be tempted and prone to brutality; second, that it describes man's victimization by unchanging traditions which could easily change if onl...