Why did Shirley Jackson write "The Lottery"?

One could come up with a multitude of reasons as to why
Jackson wrote the short story "The Lottery."

Given that her
stories typically provided a foil to her life, Jackson seemed to be flirting with ideas
she could only dream about and invent. Shirley's life was one filled with content and
without conflict.

Therefore, in her flirting with the
alternative, Jackson created stories which illustrated life as something which held
constant neuroses, the alienated, and the exiled.

Her
story, "The Lottery", depicts the old ways of a small rural farming town. The town holds
a yearly lottery so as to "find" a person to sacrifice for the
crops.

Here, Jackson flirts with the idea of human
sacrifice for the betterment of society. There are two reasons as to why she may have
constructed the story.

First, the story could simply be
depicting a period in time where sacrifice was considered accepted. People simply
followed the traditions of their culture simply because it had worked in the
past.

Second, Jackson could be examining the fact that many
times people are willing to blindly follow anything for any reason. This shows the
characters to be mules-they simply do what society tells them to without
question.