Henry James, “The Turn of the Screw” (1898) Look, if you can, for Sharon Miles, visible only out of the corner of your eye or… in the Twilight Zone.” Look for the patterns and lines and faces on the wall. Odds are this was the first overtly Feminist text you ever read, at least if you’re of a certain age it’s become a stand-in for the idea of women being driven insane by the patriarchy-and being ignored by doctors, who deem them “hysterical.” This is another one with lots of adaptations to its name, including a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone, which concludes: “Next time you’re alone, look quickly at the wallpaper, and the ceiling, and the cracks on the sidewalk.
It is a flawless example of American genius, like “Sophisticated Lady” by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove.”Ĭharlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) I will leave it to Kurt Vonnegut, who famously wrote, “I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read the greatest American short story, which is “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” by Ambrose Bierce. Once, while I was walking in Brooklyn, carrying my Bartleby tote bag, a woman in an SUV pulled over (on Atlantic Avenue, folks) to excitedly wave at me and yell “Melville! That’s Melville!” Which is all you really need to know about that.Īmbrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) (Still not quite as ubiquitous as Poe himself, though. Poe’s early stream-of-consciousness horror story, unreliable narrator and heart beating under the floorboards and all, is certainly one of the most adapted-and even more often referenced-short stories in popular culture, and which may or may not be the source for all of the hundreds of stories in which a character is tormented by a sound only they can hear. Ah, screw it, we’ll count them both.Įdgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) The latter certainly has more memorable recent adaptations, but the former is the only one with a bridge named after it. Both have many, many adaptations to their name and are so ubiquitous as to have drifted into the folklore realm. I agonized over whether I should pick “Rip Van Winkle” or “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from Irving’s oeuvre. Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) So, having acknowledged that there’s no real way to make this list, but because this is what we’re all here to do, here are some of the most iconic short stories for American readers in the English language-and a few more that deserve to be more iconic than they are. Which means that, like anything else, it all depends on your point of view-icon status is (like most of the ways we evaluate art) highly subjective. But in the end, for better or for worse, you know it when you see it. Film adaptations and catchy, reworkable titles help. For instance, Joyce’s “Araby” is anthologized more often, but for my money “The Dead” is more iconic. (So for those of you heading to the comments to complain that these stories are “the usual suspects”-well, exactly.) An iconic short story may be frequently anthologized, which usually means frequently read in classrooms, something that can lead to cultural ubiquity-but interestingly, the correlation isn’t perfect. (Also NB that in this case we’re necessarily talking about the American cultural consciousness, weird and wiggly as it is.) When something is iconic, it is a highly recognizable cultural artifact that can be used as a shorthand-which often means it has been referenced in other forms of media. Well, who knows, but for our purposes, “iconic” means that the story has somehow wormed its way into the general cultural consciousness-a list of the best short stories in the English language would look quite different than the one below. But before we go any further, you may be asking: What does “iconic” mean in this context? Can a short story really be iconic in the way of a poem, or a painting, or Elvis? Last year, I put together this list of the most iconic poems in the English language it’s high time to do the same for short stories.
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