# What is the greatest American short story of all time?

> Ten pages can hold a whole marriage, a village ritual, a war. Pick the one that does the most with the least.

*By YPB Team · Published September 8, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-greatest-american-short-story-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Lottery (Shirley Jackson)** — score 1000/1000
   Jackson's 1948 New Yorker story about a village ritual that ends in stoning.
2. **A Good Man Is Hard to Find (O'Connor)** — score 581/1000
   Flannery O'Connor's 1953 story of a family road trip that meets an escaped killer.
3. **The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Hemingway)** — score 481/1000
   Hemingway's 1936 story of a writer dying of gangrene on safari, taking stock of unwritten work.
4. **A Rose for Emily (Faulkner)** — score 481/1000
   Faulkner's 1930 story of a Southern recluse and the room nobody enters until she dies.
5. **Brokeback Mountain (Annie Proulx)** — score 440/1000
   Proulx's 1997 New Yorker story of two Wyoming ranch hands across twenty years.
6. **An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge** — score 440/1000
   Ambrose Bierce's 1890 Civil War story whose escape turns out to last only a moment.
7. **The Swimmer (John Cheever)** — score 394/1000
   Cheever's 1964 story of a man crossing his suburb pool by pool as the seasons turn against him.
8. **Hills Like White Elephants (Hemingway)** — score 281/1000
   Hemingway's 1927 story told almost entirely in dialogue at a Spanish railway station, published in Men Without Women.
9. **Babylon Revisited (Fitzgerald)** — score 281/1000
   Fitzgerald's 1931 story of a reformed drinker returning to Paris to win back his daughter.
10. **Cathedral (Raymond Carver)** — score 281/1000
   Carver's 1981 story in which a blind visitor guides a skeptical host through drawing a cathedral.
11. **Bartleby, the Scrivener (Melville)** — score 281/1000
   Melville's 1853 Wall Street story of a copyist who would prefer not to.
12. **The Tell-Tale Heart (Poe)** — score 212/1000
   Poe's 1843 confession of a murderer undone by a sound only he can hear.
13. **Where Are You Going (Oates)** — score 212/1000
   Joyce Carol Oates's 1966 story of a teenager and the stranger who pulls into her driveway.
14. **The Gift of the Magi (O. Henry)** — score 131/1000
   O. Henry's 1905 Christmas story of two sacrifices that cancel each other out.
15. **The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman)** — score 131/1000
   Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story of a woman confined to a room for a rest cure.
16. **The Things They Carried (O'Brien)** — score 131/1000
   Tim O'Brien's 1986 story cataloguing what a platoon hauled through Vietnam, physical and otherwise.
17. **Sonny's Blues (James Baldwin)** — score 36/1000
   Baldwin's 1957 story of a Harlem teacher and his jazz-musician brother, told across a nightclub set.

Tags: usa, books, classics, fiction, short stories