20 Greatest Short Story Writers of All Time

Article by: Sarah Turner, freelance writer at Globe Soup

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American short story writer Lorrie Moore once said that if novels are films, short stories are photographs, fleeting glimpses into other worlds and lives. If this is the case, a collection is an album; bound in leather and filled with distinct but connected images, slipped onto a shelf and occasionally brought down to be perused.

Here, then, are twenty of the greatest short story writers and their snapshots of the ordinary and the fantastic, the wonderful and the disturbing.

Raymond Carver

Considered one of the greatest American writers, Carver helped breathe new life into the short story in the late 20th century. His stories – Vitamins, Neighbours, Fat – are, like their titles suggest, full of small-town lives, down-on-their-luck characters and failing marriages. From a working-class background himself, Carver used pared-back prose to bring real, disillusioned existences to the page.

If you only read one story:

‘Cathedral’ (in the short story collection of the same name) is a small but poignant story.

Shirley Jackson

When The New Yorker published Shirley Jackson’s short story, ‘The Lottery’, in the summer of 1948, she was inundated with hate mail. Readers, it seems, weren’t ready for her shocking, cautionary tale of conformity and tradition.

Best known for her novel The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson wrote over two hundred short stories and is now recognised as one of the greatest horror writers – and ‘The Lottery’ as one of the best examples of a short story.

If you only read one story:

‘The Lottery’ in The Lottery and Other Stories.

James Baldwin

Born in Harlem in 1924, Baldwin was an influential writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and his collection of short stories Going to Meet the Man is widely regarded as one of the best in the genre. Concerning black lives in America, his writing deals with subjects such as racism, sexuality, integration and childhood.

If you only read one story:

‘Sonny’s Blues’. A beautiful story about pain, anger and jazz.

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Anita Desai

Thrice nominated for the Booker Prize, Anita Desai’s stories capture life in India; family dynamics, female oppression and the everyday events of childhood. Her prose glitters with detail, transforming the ordinary into something almost magical. There are no happy endings here – Desai's stories have a bleak reality to them, the characters swept along by the currents of life.

If you only read one story:

‘Games at Twilight’. A lyrical story about feeling ignored as a child.

Ray Bradbury

Autumn is the time to read Bradbury. His writing blends the speculative and the real, mixing the spooky with a deep nostalgia for his own boyhood in suburban America. His best-known collections, The Illustrated Man and October Country, are full of moonlit carnivals, mysterious creatures, and skeletons with minds of their own. Able to turn his hand to most genres, the New York Times declared he was ‘the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream.’

If you only read one story:

‘The Pedestrian’ from The Golden Apples of the Sun. It’s something of a precursor to Fahrenheit 451.

Anton Chekhov

Often considered the master of the short story, Chekhov wrote over five hundred in his relatively short life (no pressure, writers) alongside his many plays and novels (seriously, no pressure!) Eschewing drama and convoluted plots, Chekhov served up slice-of-life tales, using both the comic and the serious to get at the deeper truths beneath provincial Russian life.

If you only read one story:

‘The Lady with the Dog’' – possibly the most lauded of his stories.

Angela Carter

Fairy tales are some of the earliest examples of short stories, stirring myth, fear and morality into concoctions that can be swallowed before bedtime. Modern adaptations are two-a-penny, but in Angela Carter’s wonderful retellings, they shine like new.

Carter was a British writer whose work weaved together magical realism, feminism and the gothic. Possibly best known for her short story collection The Bloody Chamber, she also wrote acclaimed novels such as Wise Children.

If you only read one story:

‘The Bloody Chamber’ – a feminist retelling of Bluebeard.

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Edgar Allen Poe

Gothic houses? Check. Black cats? Check. Mysterious illnesses? Check.

Edgar Allen Poe was nothing short of a pioneer, not only of short fiction but of gothic horror and detective tales (Murders in the Rue Morgue is considered the first detective story in the English language.) He also often wrote with his Siamese cat on his shoulder. So there’s that.

If you only read one story:

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. You can’t go wrong with this tale of an evil house and its tormented inhabitants.

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway is a titan of Western literature, but in the 1920s he was just a young man in Paris, frequenting its cafes and boxing at its clubs. It was here that he wrote and published his first collection of short stories Three Stories and Ten Poems. Famous for his minimalist style, he went on to write novels such as For Whom the Bell Tolls.

If you only read one story:

‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’. A symbolic tale based on Hemingway’s own travels.

Alice Munro

Alice Munro has a beautiful way of taking familiar concepts and revealing them anew. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, her stories deal with ordinary life – relationships, time, memory, death – and are often set in her hometown of Huron County, Canada.

If you only read one story:

‘The Moons of Jupiter’, from the collection of the same name, is a beautifully written story of family relationships.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Famous for her acclaimed novels Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, Nigerian writer Adichie is also an accomplished short story writer. Her 2009 collection The Thing Around Your Neck masterfully blends themes of racism, nationality and womanhood.

If you only read one story:

‘The Thing Around Your Neck’, from the collection of the same name, is a model example of how to write in the second person.

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer born in 1899. A child prodigy, he translated Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince into Spanish when he was just nine years old and went on to translate the works of other greats, such as Virginia Woolf. Inspired by the books he read and his passion for philosophy, he began writing stories that dealt with infinity and identity.

If you only read one story:

‘The Library of Babel’. With its labyrinthine library, it reminded me of an iconic scene in the film Interstellar.

Tips on how to write Drabbles from James Hancock!

Zora Neale Hurston

Born in 1891, Zora Neale Hurston was part of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement of African-American arts and literature. Both a writer and an anthropologist, her novels (Their Eyes Were Watching God) and short stories weren’t recognised for their brilliance until after her death.

If you only read one story:

‘The Gilded Six-Bits’ from the collection Spunk. Set in Florida, it follows a married couple through infidelity and forgiveness.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

If you’ve ever seen Akira Kurosawa's classic, Rashomon, you’re already familiar with Akutagawa’s work. Known as the father of the Japanese short story, Akutagawa wrote over 150 stories in total before committing suicide at the age of 35. His stories take us through various eras, from early 20th-century Japan to a medieval world full of lords, shoguns and court painters.

If you only read one story:

‘In a Grove’ from Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories. Cleverly told through several perspectives, this was adapted for Kurosawa’s film.

Roald Dahl

Beloved for his classic children’s books, British writer Dahl also wrote devilishly wicked short stories for grown-ups, with his most famous collection, Tales of the Unexpected, adapted into a TV show of the same name. Macabre and darkly humorous, Dahl’s stories take us to grim B&Bs, art galleries and slaughterhouses, where nothing is ever as it seems!

If you only read one story:

‘The Landlady’ from the collection Kiss Kiss. I’ve read this to many a class of rapt teenagers.

Daphne du Maurier

It was midnight when I first stumbled across the film Don’t Look Now. Tired but stubbornly awake, I had no idea I was about to be transported to the foreboding streets of Venice. What I also didn’t know was that the story came from the pen of Daphne du Maurier. Celebrated for her gothic romance novels such as Rebecca, Du Maurier was also a prolific writer of short stories, using the form to experiment with science fiction and horror.

If you only read one story:

‘The Birds’ (adapted into Hitchcock’s film). You’ll never look at a pigeon the same way again.

George Saunders

Most famous for his Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders is also a master of the modern short story. (Some people have all the talent.) Author of five collections of short stories, his work is surrealist, experimental, disturbing and funny.

If you only read one story:

‘Home in Tenth of December’. A taut, witty, ultimately sad story of a soldier returned from war.

Katherine Mansfield

Born in New Zealand but most associated with London literary movement The Bloomsbury Group, Katherine Mansfield was a pioneer of modernist fiction. Casting off the distant narratives of Victorian literature, Mansfield got into the minds of her characters, detailing their thoughts, memories and fears.

If you only read one story:

‘The Garden Party’. In this deceptively simple classic story, a middle-class garden party is interrupted by a death.

Our advice on how to write a short story!

Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is an American science fiction writer best known for his short story Story of Your Life which was adapted into the 2016 film Arrival. Focusing on themes of free will, memory and the consequences of technology, Chiang’s fiction poses big questions about humanity.

If you only read one story:

‘Story of Your Life.’ It’s nothing short of mind-blowing.

James Joyce

Dubliners, Joyce’s only short story collection, presents stories about the city in the early 20th century, with its fractured national identity and marginalised inhabitants. Something of a modernist masterpiece, the stories are as much about what they don’t say as what they do say.