In its June 26, 1948 issue, The New Yorker published Shirley Jackson’s unsettling story “The Lottery,” and it’s not an overstatement to say that readers freaked out. They wrote letters in droves, angry or unsure about what this slowly unfolding portrait of small-town mob violence was doing in a literary-minded magazine. Now considered an American classic, the story went on to become a classroom mainstay, and a bracing influence on artists prone to see the rot in the flower bed. Here, 75 years later, 13 writers and filmmakers — plus Jackson’s graphic-novelist grandson — recall reading “The Lottery” for the first time, and why it’s stayed with them since.

Stephen King

Author, “Holly” (forthcoming)

I read it in study hall, back at good old Lisbon High School. My first reaction: Shock. My second reaction: How did she do that?

Jean Kwok

Author, “The Leftover Woman” (forthcoming)

As a first-generation Chinese immigrant, I hadn’t been exposed to much literary fiction. I was initially seduced by the calm, folksy demeanor of the characters even as I felt increasing dread as the story progressed. When “The Lottery” drew to its conclusion, I felt as if I had been struck by the stone that hit Tessie Hutchinson. Even today, “The Lottery” reminds me that it is the role of the artist to lead readers into unexpected territory.

David Sedaris

Author, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

If I’m not mistaken, my seventh-grade teacher showed us the movie of “The Lottery” before having us read it, which is unfortunate. I remember sitting in the dark when it flickered to an end, completely destroyed. I reread “The Lottery” every few years and have listened to many audio versions, none of which get the last line right in my opinion (the closest is Maureen Stapleton for The Caedmon Short Story Collection). When I first read the story it seemed fresh — was fresh, I suppose, only 23 years old. Now I wonder what a young person would make of it. The old-fashioned names: Tessie, Bobby, Dickie, Old Man Warner. None of the wives work outside of the home. Several are “scolds.” Yet when the story reaches its chilling conclusion — “All right, folks … Let’s finish quickly” — does any of that matter?

Rob Savage

Filmmaker, “The Boogeyman”

Growing up in a small countryside town, “The Lottery” confirmed all my fears and suspicions about what lay beneath the folksy, postcard-perfect surface of my community and the cruelty implicit in our blindly followed traditions. I could see the smiling faces of my friends and family in the baying Lottery crowd, recognized the casual othering and muttered prejudice of my town in their overt violence. I was a kid when I first read “The Lottery,” and a weird kid at that. I became weirder still as my world expanded beyond the parochial, and the more I became a stranger to the people I’d grown up around, the more I could picture myself being on the receiving end of their stones, should the occasion arise.

Carmen Maria Machado

Author, “In the Dream House”

I was an anxious kid who loved, even sought out, scary stories, and this one was huge for me. I wouldn’t read the rest of Shirley Jackson’s oeuvre until my early 20s, but this story’s iconic, deceptively quiet final line —“…and then they were upon her” — pursued me through my “charming poems about fairies putting dew on the flowers” writing phrase and into my “writing about life’s many horrors” phase. I am deeply grateful for the chase.

Josephine Decker

Filmmaker, “Shirley”

The first time was in middle school, and I think it affirmed my nascent understanding that the world has cruel rules, and no one understands why they are there. I recently worked with a teen mother whom Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) separated from her child for two weeks because her partner “smelled like marijuana.” No actual evidence. Shirley Jackson managed to get to the core of something incredibly true, which is that people will be attacked, without mercy, and society will approve. Because it’s something we’ve always done.

James DeMonaco

Filmmaker, “The Purge” series

I was a 12-year-old boy, in the sixth grade, prone to night terrors. “The Lottery” was a consistent double feature in my nightmares. It wasn’t the violence at the end of the story that deprived me of sleep, it was everything Shirley Jackson didn’t tell us. She never told us where we were; she never told us what year it was; and, most importantly and hauntingly, she never told us why. Why?

My first draft of “The Purge” included a three-page opening narration that explained, in detail, how the Purge came about in American society. We shot this sequence and included it in the first cut of the film. One night, I was startled awake. I had dreamed of “The Lottery” once again, still plagued by the same question — Why? The next day, I cut that opening, eliminating any explanation of the Purge’s origins.

Idra Novey

Author, “Take What You Need”

In Jackson’s description of the boys who know they will be praised for gathering stones without being asked, in the power granted to those most willing to keep the procedure going, I recognized my rural high school’s football team, certain parent voices in the stands. I recognized our mandatory ritual each afternoon — students called upon to lower the flag and fold it into a series of triangles. If any student exhibited the daring of Mrs. Hutchinson, to inquire whether we might be better off trying some other kind of fold, the student was immediately ridiculed or ignored.

Miles Hyman

Graphic novelist, “The Lottery”

I first read “The Lottery” when I was too young to understand it. In subsequent re-readings I became more attuned to my grandmother’s skill at her craft, spellbound by her meticulous, almost obsessive fine-tuning of language. But it was in adapting “The Lottery” as a graphic novel in 2016 that I felt I finally understood the story. This unusual experiment gave me the chance to take apart the original text word by word, putting it back together again in visual form — a sort of Humpty Dumpty of menace, so to speak.

Tananarive Due

Author, “The Wishing Pool and Other Stories”

Looking back, I wonder how “The Lottery” especially might have resonated with me as a young Black girl whose family was integrating a mostly white South Florida neighborhood. We had a few incidents — tomatoes thrown against the house, vandalism to our car — but most days were sunny and bright, like the one described at the opening of Shirley Jackson’s story. I didn’t know that my parents had been so worried about threats against our family that they enlisted white friends from the Unitarian church to sit watch over our house in their cars at night. But maybe, like my mother before me, I’d already learned how horror fiction could express true-life fears I couldn’t let myself think about consciously — like what might happen if an entire community turned against us and started throwing stones.

Danielle Trussoni

Author, “The Puzzle Master”

I was edging toward writing about violence, and I realized that I could go even further.

Stephen Graham Jones

Author, “Don’t Fear the Reaper”

Must have been right around fourth grade, maybe fifth. Little 2A school way out in the West Texas scrub. This would have been right when we stopped having homeroom, with one teacher doing all the subjects, and were now going from class to class, teacher to teacher. It felt so adult. The thing that lodged in me: that everything that’s about to happen — the violence, the gore, the killing — it’s happening in my head, after the story’s over. I could shut the book, but the story kept murmuring.

Levi Holloway

Playwright, “Grey House”

I was in my early 30s, just as I was starting down the course to be a playwright in Chicago. That first read — I laughed out loud to no one, then read it again immediately. It dead-stopped my heart.

Paul Tremblay

Author, “The Pallbearers Club”

I’ve reread “The Lottery” many times and remain haunted by the possibilities and ambiguity in the final line uttered by the doomed Mrs. Hutchinson: “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right.” Is she simply the victim of blind chance? Did she believe the lottery was fixed so that her name would come up? Was it supposed to have been fixed for her name not to be chosen? Is she decrying the entire lottery, the social/political system and its ugly inherent injustices? Is it existence itself that is unfair and not right? All great stories wrestle with that last question.