“‘It was a mistake,” you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you”(David Levithan). The author, Shirley Jackson intended to send a brutal message to the reader. Jackson wanted to shock the reader with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general humanity in their lives. The Lottery was also a tradition, everyone would come down to the town fair every year to basically kill whoever drew the card with the black dot on it. Jackson had modeled the village and the characters in the story after her former home in North Bennington, Vermont where she lived with her husband after they got married in 1940. The story takes place in the summer of 1948 and was based on events like WW2, the Holocaust