The Lottery and Other Stories Lesson Plan

Examine New York City as a setting in Shirley Jackson's stories.

Students may notice that Jackson's stories set in New York City frequently deal with anxiety (especially feeling unsafe or paranoid) or abandoned dreams of a better life or career. In cases like "Elizabeth" or "The Villager," the heroine left an unsatisfying small town for a hoped-for future in the city, and is still reckoning with the vast differences between her hopes and her lived reality. In stories like "Pillar of Salt" and "The Tooth," the city takes on an almost supernatural quality—persecuting the heroine with terror and uncertainty, increasingly decaying her sense of reality and identity.

How...