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Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery:
French Holocaust survivor David Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946), “which argues that the concentration camps were organized according to a carefully planned system that relied on the willingness of prisoners to harm each other.”
The American writer and intellectual Henry David Thoreau suggested that you have a moral responsibility for your government; that when the government does something wrong — say, handing out “free” small-pox infected blankets to Native American Indian tribes — that it’s not right to simply blame the government, because by extension that government belongs to you and acts on your behalf. So the blame belongs to you as well. That is part of the foundation for many of the ideas he advocates in his essay On Civil Disobedience. (from americanliterature.com )
Resources
- 11 Facts About Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” Mental Floss
- Shirley Jackson in Love & Death by Joyce Carol Oates The New York Review of Books
- The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson by Zoë Heller
Quiz: The Lottery Reading Comprehension