From Washington Irving and Nikolai Gogol to modern day masters of the genre, enjoy our selection of Best Short Story Authors
Washington Irving
Washington Irving was one of the most famous American authors of the nineteenth century. While he is primarily remembered for short stories such as “Rip van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” he also penned an extensive biography of George Washington.
Irving died of a heart attack in 1859, eight months after completing his significant biographical series on George Washington. Appropriately enough, Irving was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson was a popular American novelist and short story writer of the twentieth century, known for her forte in mystery and horror fiction. Supernatural, sinister and mysterious elements played significant role in her works. Her notable works include the short story The Lottery and the novel The Haunting of Hill House.
Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol, the author of the first great Russian novel of the 19th century, Dead Souls, as well as two classic plays and some of the finest short stories written in any language, was a true literary oddity. His peculiar, unhappy life and his uniquely dark comic sensibility have been consistently misunderstood by posterity, with critics fiercely debating his nationality, his religious beliefs, and even his sexuality.
What has never been in doubt, however, is his immense literary talent which provided a template for the absurdist, surreal streak in Russian literature that continues to bear fruit to this day.
James Joyce
One of the most influential and innovative writers of the 20th century, James Joyce was the author of the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.
Joyce’s stories , with their innovative language, use of dialogue, characteristic modernist forms, and social frankness, met with resistance when they first appeared in print. Ulysses was serialized in the United States and England before Sylvia Beach, of the bookstore Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, published it as a complete book. It was banned in the United States from 1922 until 1933.
Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925, and died in 1964, at the age of 39. Despite her short life, she transformed American fiction with her two novels and 32 short stories, which relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters to probe moral and religious issues. She is best known for her story A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which appeared in a book of the same name. Posthumously compiled, the Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. During his troubled lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including The Metamorphosis, The Judgment, and The Stoker. These did not garner much success. He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.
Jorge Luis Borges
Borges was born into an upper class family, and received his education in Buenos Aires, Cambridge, and Geneva. He began writing as a student, and when in 1918 he settled in Spain, it was as a member of an experimental literary group. He returned to Argentina in 1921, and had his first poems published in 1923. He loved Buenos Aires.
He lost his eyesight during the 1950’s, but continued to write prolifically. His works have been translated into many languages. Brilliant, courtly, and thoughtful, Borges was director of the National Library of Argentina for many years. A month before his death he married Maria Kodama, with whom he had collaborated on his last book.
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen.
His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women, The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories.
Guy de Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893 was a popular French author who is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story as well as one of its finest practitioners. His prolific and deeply admired body of work influenced a great number of writers including William Somerset Maugham, Chekhov, Kate Chopin and Henry James.
As a young man he fought in the Franco-Prussian War. He drew heavily on that experience and that war provides the setting for many of his stories which often depict the tragedy and suffering of innocent civilians caught in war’s path. He also found inspiration in the not-so-admirable behavior of the bourgeoisie, and made them targets of his biting pessimism and skewering pen.
Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami has published more than a dozen novels and several short-story collections and works of nonfiction, all of which have been translated from their original Japanese into English and many other languages.
In his mysterious and haunting stories he often contemplates what-ifs: What if a monkey stole your name? What if a beetle woke up as Gregor Samsa? What if you had to deliver an empty box and it changed your life? “When I’m writing novels, reality and unreality just naturally get mixed together,” he said in an interview. “It’s not as if that was my plan and I’m following it as I write, but the more I try to write about reality in a realistic way, the more the unreal world invariably emerges.” Inquisitive and exploratory, Murakami’s fiction often takes you somewhere new and then forces you to find a way home.
Alice Walker
Alice Walker is a novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist, and activist. Her most famous novel, The Color Purple, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. She published a number of wonderful short story collections throughout her career.
Walker’s creative vision is rooted in the economic hardship, racial terror, and folk wisdom of African American life and culture, particularly in the rural South. Her writing explores multidimensional kinships among women and embraces the redemptive power of social and political revolution.
Kevin Barry
Kevin Barry is the author of the short story collections Dark Lies The Island and There Are Little Kingdoms He has won the Authors Club Best First Novel Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, and he has been shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Granta Book of the Irish Story, and many other journals. He also works on plays and screenplays and he lives in County Sligo. It is the short story format where he really shines, wickedly funny and hugely original.
Denis Johnson
In novels, stories, plays and poems, Denis Johnson, wrote about characters best described as fallen angels. Life beset them with problems and they responded by taking to drugs or crime, or going on the road, each effort to cope creating new dilemmas. His best known work, Jesus’ Son (1992), is a short-story collection linked by its narrator, known only by the name others call him, Fuckhead.
Johnson himself battled alcohol abuse and later drug problems. He said one of the reasons he did not take control of his problem earlier was that he was afraid it would adversely affect his creativity.
Alice Munro
Canadian writer Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, South West Ontario and has written short fiction since 1950.
Her books consist of collections of short stories, and one book which has been published as a novel, although it is actually a set of inter-linked stories which falls between the two genres. Her accessible, moving stories are set in her native Canada, in small, provincial towns like the one in which she grew up, and explore human relationships through ordinary everyday events. Although not necessarily directly autobiographical, they reflect the author’s own life experiences, are concerned with women’s lives and are probably unrivalled in their fullness
George Saunders
George Saunders is the author of nine books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize, and the story collections Pastoralia and Tenth of December.
His most recent book is another masterful short story collection Liberation Day that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise.
Test your knowledge of the the Short Story Genre with our Incredible Short Story Quiz.
