The disciplined objectivity of "The Lottery" makes it seem as urgently real as a newspaper story—so much so that some readers misread it as a factual account, writing the New Yorker to ask just where these gruesome lotteries were taking place. Jackson's scrupulously neutral tone can seem clinical at first, but it serves a larger moral vision. Several months before Jackson died, she visited Georgia to see the home of the recently deceased Flannery O'Connor, a writer whom Jackson admired. Like O'Connor, Jackson incorporated violence in her work not in the service of sensationalism but to explore the world's fullest spiritual dimensions. In all of Jackson's work, writes Kevin Wilson, "It is so unsettling to see the darkness and the chaos beneath the surface. We encounter a world where, thanks to Jackson's talent, we recoil from the danger and then move closer to see it more clearly."
Shirley Jackson grew accustomed to staring demons in the face, in no small measure because she had demons of her own. She was born in 1916 in San Francisco to an affluent family that didn't quite know what to do with her bohemian artistic personality. The Jacksons eventually moved to Rochester, New York, where Shirley proved an indifferent college student, graduating without distinction from Syracuse in 1940. Jackson married the literary critic and college professor Stanley Hyman, and they spent most of their years together in Vermont, where she raised four children and wrote the books that earned her international fame. Jackson battled with obesity, smoked and drank heavily, and abused amphetamines and barbiturates. On August 8, 1965, while taking an afternoon nap, she died of heart failure.
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