Answered By: Doug Bolden
Last Updated: Oct 07, 2015     Views: 259

One of our best resources for this kind of query is the Literature Resources from Gale. You can search with

Name of Work = "The Lottery"

Person-by or -about = "Shirley Jackson".

As of right now, my search brought me back 15 different articles of criticism and so forth.

A series of books that we have for a number of different short stories is:

PN3373 .S3845 1997

Short stories for students : presenting analysis, context, and criticism on commonly studied short stories / Kathleen Wilson, Editor

This is located in our South Wing on the first floor. The first volume has the informaton Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. If you have other stories, then you can look at the last volume, volume 16, and there is an index in the back.

On the shelves upstairs in the third floor, North Wing, we have a couple of other books worth looking up. You can find both of these by going to call PS3519. Her works should be there to start, and then following will be the literary critique of them.

  • Shirley Jackson's American gothic / Darryl Hattenhauer [PS3519 .A392 Z7 2003]
  • Shirley Jackson : essays on the literary legacy / edited by Bernice M. Murphy [PS3519 .A392 Z853 2005]
  • Private demons : the life of Shirley Jackson / Judy Oppenheimer [PS3519 .A392 Z8 1988]

In general, this is not a bad way to locate literary critique, look for the book you are doing the research on and then look past the book (physicall, to the right and/or down) and the critique is often nearby by call number, if not actually under the same call number.