Rip Van Winkle ; Legend of Sleepy Hollow / Washington Irving -- Rappaccini's daughter / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Fall of the House of Usher ; Murders in the Rue Morgue ; Purloined letter / Edgar Allan Poe -- Benito Cereno / Herman Melville -- Man without a country / Edward Everett Hale -- Lady, or the tiger / Frank R. Stockton -- Celebrated jumping from of Calaveras County ; Man that corrupted Hadleyburg / Mark Twain -- Luck of Roaring Camp ; Outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte -- Marjorie Daw / Thomas Bailey Aldrich -- Damned thing ; An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge / Ambrose Bierce -- Turn of the screw / Henry James -- Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and the Tar Baby / Joel Chandler Harris -- A white heron / Sarah Orne Jewett -- Story of the other wise man / Henry Van Dyke -- Return of a private / Hamlin Garland -- Mission of Jane / Edith Wharton -- Gift of the Magi ; Furnished room / O. Henry -- A deal in wheat / Frank Norris -- Open boat / Stephen Crane -- Lost Phoebe / Theodore Dreiser -- Paul's case / Willa Cather -- To build a fire / Jack London -- I'm a fool / Sherwood Anderson -- Golden homeymoon / Ring Lardner -- Afternoon of a faun / Edna Ferber -- Humoresque / Fannie Hurst -- Silent snow, secret snow / Conrad Aiken -- Flowering Judas / Katherine Anne Porter -- Big blonde / Dorothy Parker -- Secret life of Walter Mitty / James Thurber -- Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- A rose for Emily / William Faulkner -- Devil and Daniel Webster / Stephen Vincent Benét -- Snows of Kilimanjaro / Ernest Hemingway -- Lost boy / Thomas Wolfe -- Red pony / John Steinbeck -- Gimpel the fool / Isaac Bashevis Singer -- Imagine kissing Pete / John O'Hara -- Daring young man on the flying trapeze / William Saroyan -- Death of a traveling salesman / Eudora Welty -- Christ in concrete / Pietro Di Donato -- Country husband / John Cheever -- Magic barrel / Bernard Malamud -- A silver dish / Saul Bellow -- Lottery / Shirley Jackson -- There will come soft rains / Ray Bradbury -- Welcome to the monkey house / Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. -- A Christmas memory / Truman Capote -- Tell me how long the train's been going / James Baldwin -- A good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor -- Pigeon feathers / John Updike -- Where are you going, where have you been? / Joyce Carol Oates