![]() ![]() A letter from a fiction editor at the magazine, dated April 9, makes reference to a phone call he and Jackson had shared the day before and reiterates a number of suggested changes. As I recently found during a trip to Jackson’s papers at the Library of Congress, a draft of “The Lottery” she sent to The New Yorker was reviewed by different editors on March 16 and April 12 of that year. “I had written the story three weeks before, on a bright June morning when the summer seemed to have come at last, with blue skies and warm sun.” Only, that’s not really true. On June 26, 1948, she claims in the lecture, she went to the post office and retrieved a copy of that week’s New Yorker, which had her story in it. “The Lottery” is notoriously steeped in confusion and myth, and Jackson’s account of writing and editing the story is, it turns out, another myth. As a matter of fact, when I read it over later I decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes, and the story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft.” ![]() “I had the idea fairly clearly in my mind when I put my daughter in her playpen and the frozen vegetables in the refrigerator,” she recounts in the lecture, “and, writing the story, I found that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause. ![]()
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