For most the idea was the anonymous nature of the village, and how easy it was for anyone to commit an atrocity against another, if given the official sanction to do so. Stanley Edgar Hyman believed that the nature and purpose of his wife's work were misunderstood because her "fierce visions of dissociation and madness, of alienation and withdrawal, of cruelty and terror" were interpreted as "personal, even neurotic, fantasies." Hyman insisted that instead these visions were "a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb." (6)

Hague 73)

Jackson seeks again, as so many before her have, to point out to the modern world, that we are never far from our barbarous past, no matter how civilized we pretend to be, even the victim of the lottery, had not failed to finish doing the families...

"A Faithful Anatomy of Our Times": Reassessing Shirley Jackson." Frontiers - a Journal of Women's Studies 26.2 (2005): 73.
Jackson, Shirley the Lottery. Retrieved October 15, 2007 at http://fiction.eserver.org/short/the_lottery.html

Kravits, Bennett. "Reinventing the World and Reinventing the Self in Huck Finn." Papers on Language & Literature 40.1 (2004): 3.

London, Jack to Build a Fire. Retrieved October 15, 2007 at http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Jack_London/To_Build_a_Fire/To_Build_a_Fire_p1.html

McClintock, James I. Jack London's Strong Truths. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1997.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York P.F. Collier & Son, 1918.