# What is the saddest ending in American literature?

> Sixteen last pages, ranked by damage: some wreck a marriage, some a family, some a whole migration west.

*By YPB Team · Published September 8, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-saddest-ending-in-american-literature*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Great Gatsby** — score 1000/1000
   Fitzgerald's 1925 novel that ends with a funeral almost nobody attends and a green light nobody reaches.
2. **Beloved** — score 952/1000
   Toni Morrison's 1987 novel about slavery's aftermath, closing on a name that is barely remembered.
3. **The Bell Jar** — score 835/1000
   Sylvia Plath's 1963 novel of breakdown and recovery, ending on a door that could still swing either way.
4. **The Grapes of Wrath** — score 734/1000
   Steinbeck's 1939 Dust Bowl epic that ends in a flooded boxcar with an act of desperate mercy.
5. **Ethan Frome** — score 659/1000
   Edith Wharton's 1911 New England tragedy whose ending traps three people in one house for decades.
6. **The House of Mirth** — score 571/1000
   Wharton's 1905 novel of New York society that ends with a word left unsaid over a deathbed.
7. **Of Mice and Men** — score 571/1000
   Steinbeck's 1937 novella that closes with one friend making an impossible choice for another.
8. **Revolutionary Road** — score 571/1000
   Richard Yates's 1961 suburban novel that ends with a neighbor quietly turning down his hearing aid.
9. **Flowers for Algernon** — score 571/1000
   Daniel Keyes's novel whose final journal entries record a mind slipping back to where it started.
10. **For Whom the Bell Tolls** — score 467/1000
   Hemingway's Spanish Civil War novel that leaves its hero alone on a hillside waiting for soldiers.
11. **A Farewell to Arms** — score 343/1000
   Hemingway's 1929 war novel whose last pages leave its narrator walking back to the hotel in the rain.
12. **Native Son** — score 343/1000
   Richard Wright's 1940 novel that closes with a cell door and a handshake through the bars.
13. **The Road** — score 190/1000
   Cormac McCarthy's 2006 post-apocalyptic novel that ends with a father's last conversation with his son.
14. **Sophie's Choice** — score 190/1000
   William Styron's 1979 novel that saves its unbearable revelation for the last act.
15. **Tender Is the Night** — score 190/1000
   Fitzgerald's 1934 novel that fades out with a brilliant man practicing medicine in small upstate towns.
16. **The Sound and the Fury** — score 190/1000
   Faulkner's 1929 novel of a collapsing Southern family, ending on a wail that stops only when order is restored.

Tags: usa, books, classics, fiction, endings