Shirley Jackson

Jackson settled in the small college town of Bennington, Vermont, where her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, taught, and raised four children while writing at a ferocious pace: dark fiction by night, comic domestic memoirs of chaotic family life by day, published under her own byline.

'The Lottery' appeared in The New Yorker in 1948 and provoked the largest reader response the magazine had ever received for a piece of fiction: subscription cancellations, hate mail, readers demanding to know where such lotteries actually took place. She never fully explained the story, letting the outrage stand as its own commentary on small-town conformity.

Increasingly agoraphobic and dependent on tranquilizers and amphetamines in her final years, she died in her sleep of heart failure in 1965, at forty-eight.