she received in 1948: The New Yorker kept no records of the phone calls, but letters addressed to Jackson were forwarded to her. That summer she regularly took home 10 to 12 forwarded letters each day. She also received weekly packages from The New Yorker containing letters and questions addressed to the magazine or editor Harold Ross, plus carbon copies of the magazine's responses mailed to letter writers. Critical interpretations Helen E. Nebeker's essay The Lottery': Symbolic Tour de Force" in American Literature (March 1974) claims that every major name in the story has a special significance. Fritz Oehlschlaeger, in "The Stoning of Mistress Hutchinson: Meaning and Context in 'The Lottery (Essays in Literature, 1988), wrote: The 1992 episode "Dog of Death" of The Simpsons features a scene referring to "The Lottery". During the peak of the lottery fever in Springfield, news anchor Kent Brockman announces on television that people hoping to get tips on how to win the jackpot have borrowed every available copy of Shirley Jackson's book The Lottery at the local library. One of them is Homer, who throws the book into the fireplace after Brockman reveals that "Of course, the book does not contain any hints on how to win the lottery. It is, rather, a chilling tale of conformity gone mad." In her book Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, Bernice Murphy comments that this scene displays some of the most contradictory things about Jackson: "It says a lot about the visibility of Jackson's most notorious tale that more than 50 years after its initial creation it is still famous enough to warrant a mention in the world's most famous sitcom. The fact that Springfield's citizenry also miss the point of Jackson's story completely ... can perhaps be seen as an indication of a more general misrepresentation of Jackson and her work." In "Arbitrary Condemnation and Sanctioned Violence in Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery (December 2004), Patrick J. Shields suggests there is a connection between the death penalty and "The Lottery" when writing: Others have made comparisons between the lottery and the military draft, whereby young men aged 18–25 were selected at random for military service by the Selective Service System. The story was written just three years after the end of World War II, in which ten million men were drafted and over 400,000 died, and was published just two days after the enactment