The best of American short fiction Spanning over 100 years of literary history, here are 33 of the finest short stories by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Bayard Taylor, Rose Terry Cooke, Ambrose Bierce, Hamlin Garland, Mary E. Wilkens Freeman, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Grace Elizabeth King, Harold Frederic, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Jack London, F. Hopkinson Smith, Zona Gale, O. Henry, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Stephen Vincent Benet, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, James Thurber, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Saroyan,