Top 10 Short Stories for American Literature (and Why They’re Worth Teaching)

If you’re looking for short stories for you American lit. class you’re probably either A) hoping to find something that will engage your apathetic students B) sick of teaching the same tired old stories you’ve had to teach year after year or C) desperately trying to piece together a curriculum after your department changed your teaching assignment again.

The good news is that whatever else we might get wrong in this country, the American canon is not short on masterpieces.  From creepy Gothic fiction to poignant stories of dealing with immigrant parents, from quiet tales of resistance to haunting stories of injustice and cruelty—there is a lot to choose from.

The problem is that often the stories that will engage your students and are worth spending time on are not always the easiest to teach.  Great short stories are just so challenging—so dense, so meticulously crafted, and so seemingly effortless—that it’s often hard to even pinpoint what makes them good, let alone get your students to appreciate that artistry.

You want to discuss the big ideas, but first you need to get students to understand the basic plot. You want them to appreciate the subtle ways that the author has integrated setting, point of view, and dialogue into the themes of the story, but you don’t want them to just identify those elements and move on.  And most importantly, you want them to analyze and write about the story without killing any enjoyment they might find in the text.

It’s a tough balance, but I’ve spent years working to design lessons that don’t lower the bar or simply tell students what to think. Instead, they give students the support they need to tackle challenging stories with confidence and reach their own conclusions.

To be honest, I never could have made such complete units for these stories while I was still in the classroom. Now I get to spend hours reading and rereading, chasing down rabbit holes, and asking myself, How do I get teenagers to appreciate, understand, and actually enjoy this piece of literature that I love so much? As it turns out I really like trying to answer that question.

Here are my top 10 favorite American short stories and why I think they’re worth teaching.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Okay, starting out with a doozy, I know, but I do think that Gilman’s masterpiece about a 19th-century housewife and her wallpaper is a great choice for teaching in an American lit. class.  The narrator’s struggle to define and maintain her own identity against all odds, not to mention the super creepy gothic elements, are just so good. But students have a hard time with the stream-of-consciousness, lack of plot, and seemingly-random structure. So I like to take my time with this story, starting off with freewrites on the essential questions, pausing for a close reading of the first passage, and exploring it alongside the ideas of the Angel in the House, Gilman’s essay on why she wrote the story, and excerpts from The Rest Cure.  When students feel the rage and resistance of the narrator, I know that I’ve done this one justice.

“The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin

Another classic of 19th-century feminist writing, this very short story is challenging for other reasons.  For one, it’s a text that relies heavily on subtle setting details—and I don’t know about your students, but in my experience, teens get to the setting part of the story and immediately say “skip!”  It’s also very short and revolves around irony, something that teens often find challenging.  Finally, it’s not exactly a relatable subject for contemporary teens. But the story’s themes around identity, freedom, and rebirth seem so quintessentially American that I think it’s a shame not to teach it.  The keys to teaching this great story, in my experience, are to make sure that students see the universality of the themes through bellringer freewrite prompts on topics like freedom and love, that they really understand dramatic irony before reading, and that they notice the subtle details of the text by answering close reading questions that get them to notice the details rather than just explaining them to them. 

“John Redding Goes To Sea” by Zora Neale Hurston

I think just about anything that Hurston ever wrote belongs in an American lit. curriculum—but this story of a man who pursues his dreams and fails seems to really touch on some of the central themes of the literary tradition in this country.  It’s neither overly optimistic nor overly pessimistic—instead it walks that thin line of staying subtle and complex in its themes.  The main character wants to leave his small town and travel the world, but just like the wooden boats that he plays with as a child, he gets caught up in the weeds and prevented from reaching his destination.  Students often have a hard time with Hurston’s use of dialect, and this can be even more challenging with a story than with a novel. So we start off with a pre-reading activity that gets them to “hear” the text.  This story is also challenging because the setting plays an essential role, and so I love to use this story to teach close reading of a literary passage by having students analyze a detailed description of a storm. 

“Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston

Yeah, I’ve got two Hurston stories here, but she’s just so good!  And what I love about this story is honestly very different from what I love about “John Redding.”  While “Sweat” is very well-known, and usually the story of hers that is included in anthologies, it’s almost deceptively simple.  It reads like a simple story of reaping what you sow—and students love to see the evil Sykes Jones get what he deserves.  But it’s also a story that is incredibly rich in allusion.  After exploring the many biblical and song references in the text as well as completing a slow close reading of the fabulous figurative language, students come to understand and analyze the story at a level that is hard to find with many texts.  Plus, teaching this story means getting to listen to Hurston sing the songs that she learned through her anthropological research during the Great Depression—such a great experience!

“Barn Burning” by William Faulkner

Back in my early days of teaching, I attempted to teach a full Faulkner novel with my classes.  I did not ever try that again.  But I do love his work so much!  This short story is another tough one—from the challenging language to the stream-of-consciousness prose, it can be hard to get through.  But what I really love about it is how it challenges students to change their minds about what it means to be loyal and do the right thing.  They often side with the main character Sarty on their first reading, but after they learn more about the historical context of resistance movements of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the Great Depression, students start to realize that maybe it is true that “You got to learn to stick to your own blood.”  

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates

Another masterpiece of American Gothic literature, this story has just haunted me for my whole life.  But to me what makes it truly American in my opinion is the way that Oates seems to effortlessly combine the 1960s car culture, true-crime vibes, and a truly universal struggle to find yourself.  The thing about this story, though, is that it can seem like a straightforward creepy story. Few things make me want to jump out of my skin like a teenager saying “Dude, it’s not that deep.”  I try to combat this refusal to go deep with a thorough exploration of context and a focus on discussion questions that don’t have easy answers.  For this story, that means exploring the Death and the Maiden motif, the Bible story Judges 19, the true story of the serial killer that inspired Oates, and discussing questions like “Does Oates’ portrayal of American teenage life seem dated? Why or why not?” 

“The Man to Send Rainclouds” by Leslie Marmon Silko

This seemingly simple story tells the story of the peaceful death and burial rituals of the old shepherd Teofilo.  It’s lovely and sad and truly masterfully written.  But its also very subtle and definitely lacking in fast-paced plotting. What I love about this story is that while it is accessible to most students, it also really rewards analysis and discussion. Dealing with themes of cultural assimilation, nature, religion, ritual, and tradition, it’s also great choice for teaching setting, allusion, figurative language, and symbolism. I use my usual approach of starting off with freewrites on the big questions like “Write about a time when you did something for someone else because it was important to them even though you didn’t really believe in it yourself.” Or “Write about a time when you traveled to a new place and felt like an outsider.  Why didn’t you belong?  Why did others belong?”  After reading the story, students complete close reading questions and then discuss questions like “What is Silko’s attitude towards the characters’ choices around the burial rituals?  What point do you think Silko is making in the story about the combining of cultures and beliefs?”

“Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut

From the first line of this story, “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal,” you know that it’s going to be a tricky one. Vonnegut is certainly a master of satire, but the thing is that teenagers, for all their sarcastic ways, don’t aways understand irony. So the first challenge when reading this seemingly simple story is to make sure that students catch all of the subtle critiques—the fact that in the story there are 213 amendments to the constitution while we currently have 27, for example, or the unintended consequences of making everyone “equal.”  But once students really feel the impact of the story, I think the real challenge is to get them thinking about what’s next.  Vonnegut has said that the writer should be an “agent of change,” and so I take advantage of the emotional impact of his classic story to get students thinking about the importance of dissent, how to “talk to the enemy” with a fun yet challenging class exercise, and Greta Thunberg, an inspiring example of someone who is speaking out against injustice and making a difference in her world.

“Two Kinds” by Amy Tan

Of all of the stories on this list, this might be one of the most accessible and relatable to teen readers. But again, what makes this challenging to teach is that students don’t realize that the reason why the story is readable, funny, sad, and memorable is because it’s so well done—Tan makes writing seem effortless, and it can be hard to get students to really did deep when they think something is simply enjoyable.  The reason I love this story so much is that it deals with such a quintessential American experience—the immigrant parent whose high hopes for their child are actually crushing. But it’s also such a universal experience—how do you show love for someone when you just can’t communicate with them?  With this story, I take my usual approach of freewrite, close reading questions, then discussion.  And I also include an engaging “agree/disagree” activity as a fun opener.  Getting students to consider whether or not the agree with statements like “Do or do not. There is no try.”—Yoda or “It’s possible to be obedient to authority and still retain your own independence” really get them to understand the universality of the essential questions of the story.

“Fiesta, 1980” by Junot Díaz

This story is hilarious and sad and relatable and touching, and while it hasn’t quite reached masterpiece status like some of the others on this list, I do think it’s an excellent choice for American Literature classes—with one caveat!  I have on more than one occasion gotten in trouble for assigning a text that I mostly read or that I kind of sort of forgot had that one scene or that one problematic word. So I’ll give you the warning now that if you have students read the original text of this story, you might get the same angry email from your department head that I did when I didn’t fully read the text I assigned.  Instead, I suggest listening to an NPR performance as a class and not giving students the text of the story.  

Reading over this list, I realize that you could of course teach anything by an American writer in your America Lit. Class.  But I do think that there are some themes, stories, and well, vibes, that are just uniquely American.  Stories about creating your own identity, stories about pursuing dreams, the complicated mix of assimilation and culture and immigration—these are the kinds of elements that make stories uniquely American to me.

While these amazing texts all have their challenges, I don’t want to scare you off too much from trying them with your classes.  I do think that they are all accessible with the right scaffolding, and once you get into a routine with your classes, they’ll be more comfortable with the approaches outlined here.

If you’d like to build your own version of these units, everything you need is here in this post.

But if you’d rather skip the prep and have the freewrite prompts, close reading and discussion questions, and paired texts and sources ready to go, you can check out my bundle of these ten American literature stories here.