The New Yorker

The New Yorker enters this account of Shirley Jackson chiefly as the original venue for “The Lottery,” the story whose publication joined the magazine to one of the most consequential controversies in Jackson’s career. The story’s debut and its hostile reception stand in striking contrast to its later familiarity: it became a work many readers knew, sometimes without knowing its author.

Publication and Cultural Reach

The introduction describes “The Lottery” as the most widely anthologized American short story, presenting its reach as broad enough that people who did not recognize Shirley Jackson’s name had often read the story. Its appearance in The New Yorker is central to that account: the magazine is the publication site associated with a story that moved beyond its original readership and settled into cultural memory.

Controversy and Reader Reaction

The story’s debut in The New Yorker provoked an angry response. The account recalls hate mail calling it “nauseating,” “perverted,” and “vicious,” along with cancelled subscriptions and warnings to Jackson never to visit Canada. These reactions make the magazine more than a bibliographic detail in the story’s history: its pages became the setting for a publication that readers answered with denunciation and withdrawal. The evidence describes the response to Jackson’s story, rather than specifying any institutional response by the magazine.

Place in Jackson’s Reception

The introduction frames the story’s reception as part of a lasting imbalance between the fame of Jackson’s work and recognition of her name. Readers could know “The Lottery” and remember it without identifying its author; the story’s visibility through anthologies helped sustain that pattern. The New Yorker is thus linked both to the story’s initial controversy and to the beginning of a public life that outlasted the uproar surrounding its debut.