The Lottery, or The Adventures of James Harris

Published in 1949 under its original title The Lottery, or, The Adventures of James Harris, this is Shirley Jackson's only story collection published in her lifetime — 25 stories threaded together by recurring appearances of a sinister figure named James Harris, drawn from the old ballad "The Daemon Lover." The collection's sections are each prefaced by quotations from a 17th-century treatise on witchcraft, underscoring the folkloric dread running beneath Jackson's otherwise ordinary, mid-century settings.

Its title story, "The Lottery," remains one of the most famous and controversial short stories in American literature: a seemingly wholesome small-town tradition that turns without warning into a ritual of communal violence. Jackson received hate mail and lost New Yorker subscribers over it on first publication; it's now considered a landmark critique of unexamined tradition and mob complicity.