Shirley Jackson: The Lottery and Other Stories

“Nancy next,” Mr. Summers said. Nancy was twelve, and her school friends breathed heavily as she went forward, switching her skirt, and took a slip daintily from the box. “Bill, Jr.,” Mr. Summers said, and Billy, his face red and his feet overlarge, nearly knocked the box over as he got a paper out. “Tessie,” Mr. Summers said. She hesitated for a minute, looking around defiantly, and then set her lips and went up to the box. She snatched a paper out and held it behind her.

“Bill,” Mr. Summers said, and Bill Hutchinson reached into the box and felt around, bringing his hand out at last with the slip of paper in it.

The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, “I hope it’s not Nancy,” and the sound of the whisper reached the edges of the crowd.

“It’s not the way it used to be,” Old Man Warner said clearly. “People ain’t the way they used to be.”

“All right,” Mr. Summers said. “Open the papers. Harry, you open little Dave’s.”

Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper and there was a general sigh through the crowd as he held it up and everyone could see that it was blank. Nancy and Bill, Jr., opened theirs at the same time, and both beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of paper above their heads.

“Tessie,” Mr. Summers said. There was a pause, and then Mr. Summers looked at Bill Hutchinson, and Bill unfolded his paper and showed it. It was blank.

“It’s Tessie,” Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed. “Show us her paper, Bill.”

Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal-company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.

“All right, folks,” Mr. Summers said. “Let’s finish quickly.”

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up.”

Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath, “I can’t run at all. You’ll have to go ahead and I’ll catch up with you.”

The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 1948, 1949 by Shirley Jackson

Copyright renewed © 1976, 1977 by Laurence Hyman, Barry Hyman, Mrs. Sarah Webster, and Mrs. Joanne Schnurer

Introduction copyright © 2005 by A. M. Homes

All rights reserved

Published in 1949 by Farrar, Straus and Company

Some of these stories have appeared in The American Mercury, Charm, Harper’s, The Hudson Review, Mademoiselle, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Story magazine, The Woman’s Home Companion , and The Yale Review and are reprinted by the kind permission of the editors. The stories “After You, My Dear Alphonse,” “Come Dance with Me in Ireland,” and “Afternoon in Linen” (1943), “A Fine Old Firm,” “Colloquy,” and “Trial by Combat” (1944), and “The Lottery” (1948), copyrighted in the respective years and renewals obtained by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. (formerly The F.R. Publishing Corp.). “Charles” reprinted from Mademoiselle , July 1948. “Pillar of Salt” reprinted from Mademoiselle , October 1948. “Seven Types of Ambiguity” copyright 1948 by Story magazine. “The Renegade” copyright 1948 by Harper and Brothers. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

The author’s original title for this collection was The Lottery or, The Adventures of James Harris

Library of Congress Control Number: 2004062825

ISBN: 978-1-4299-5784-7

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