What Did Readers Make Of ‘The Lottery’ In 1948?

The New Yorker received more letters (over 300) in response to Shirley Jackson’s story than to anything else the magazine had yet published. Only 18 of those responses were positive, Jackson later said; the rest were split between “bewilderment, speculation, and plain old-fashioned abuse” – and all too many readers thought the story was real.

J.D. Salinger, Hindu Mysticism, And World War II

Ron Rosenbaum considers the reclusive author’s decades of correspondence with the swamis at the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center and what those letters might tell us about all the late-life writing Salinger kept hidden. Then Rosenbaum begins a campaign for Salinger’s estate to tell us something about that work. (Hey, it worked when he did it for Nabokov.)