Shirley jackson biography of a story
Shirley jackson biography of a story movie.
Biography of a Story
When first published in 1948, Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ caused a public outcry.
Shirley jackson biography of a story
A parable that concludes, shockingly, as an innocent woman is stoned to death by her community, Jackson’s story, for many readers, was deeply unsettling. The New Yorker, where it appeared, received hundreds of letters from subscribers demanding an explanation.
As Ruth Franklin mentions in Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (2016), Kip Orr, who was charged with writing responses to these letters, did so ‘with the magazine’s standard formulation … ‘It seems to us that Miss Jackson’s story can be interpreted in half a dozen different ways,’ he wrote to reader after reader.
‘It’s just a fable’. (quoted in Franklin 235) That ‘The Lottery’ is so open to interpretation is precisely what made it appealing to me, but the more I learned about the circumstances in which the story was written, the more I came to see it, first and foremost,