Word: yorkerized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Racing against a November deadline on a play about The New Yorker magazine that he started writing nine years ago, Humorist James Thurber was "midway through the second act for the 28th time" when he got some news: another producer was putting on another playwright's comedy about the same magazine...
...last Lampoon of the year is now out on the stands and a quick flip-through will give the prospective buyer the best that the magazine has to offer: its cartoons. There are two or three in the current issue which could conceivably appear in "The New Yorker" during its annual mid-summer slump and one, entitled "La Mouche," is probably the best the Lampoon has printed this year...
When the title story in this collection of tales first appeared in The New Yorker, it brought forth a flood of mail. Few readers were sure they knew what the story meant, but it had dug its way into their minds...
Unfortunately, nothing else in The Lottery is as good. The other 24 pieces are brightly lacquered sketches trimmed to New Yorker specifications-deadpan, passionless portraits of cruel children, quietly miserable spinsters, clumsy middle-class drifters, city people lonely in the country. Shirley Jackson accumulates little piles of irrelevant detail, topples them over with the expected sardonic swipe. If she could break out of this mold, she might become one of the U.S.'s best short-story writers...
This story should bother you. It worried other people enough so that they sent off to the New Yorker a record bundle of letters when the story first appeared last summer. The plot is an inordinately simple one, set in a narrow New England town; revealing it would tip one of the most persistently puzzling stories that has turned up in quite a while. Miss Jackson nimbly precipitates a commonplace situation into quiet mystery, then active horror. "The Lottery" is an allegory, and a fine one: it cuts too close to the heart of people and their customs...