Memorize these and you could recognize 22.8% of all Short Stories clues.
| # | Answer | Appearances | Sample Clue |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Walter Mitty | 5 | "With that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad", according to Thurber |
| 2 | Rip Van Winkle | 5 | This Washington Irving title character had "An insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor" |
| 3 | O. Henry | 4 | He called his third collection of short stories "The Trimmed Lamp and Other Stories of the Four Million" |
| 4 | (Edgar Allan) Poe | 3 | His macabre 1843 tale "The Black Cat" is one of his most gruesome |
| 5 | Stephen Crane | 2 | Henry Fleming appears in this author's short story "Lynx-Hunting" as well as in "The Red Badge of Courage" |
| 6 | New Orleans | 2 | This city is the setting for the stories in George Washington Cable's "Old Creole Days" |
| 7 | Miss Marple | 2 | Agatha Christie's collection "Thirteen for Luck" includes 3 stories about this spinster |
| 8 | John Steinbeck | 2 | "The Pastures Of Heaven" is his collection of stories about the people of a farm community of Salinas |
| 9 | J.D. Salinger | 2 | "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" was one of the "Nine Stories" he published after "Catcher in the Rye" |
| 10 | Isaac Bashevis Singer | 2 | Saul Bellow translated this writer's Yiddish short story, "Gimpel The Fool" into English |
| 11 | Ernest Hemingway | 2 | This author's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is set on an African safari |
| 12 | "The Lottery" | 2 | Tessie Hutchinson is the fatally unlucky winner of this contest in a Shirley Jackson story |
| 13 | Eudora Welty | 2 | She began writing short stories while working for the W.P.A. in Mississippi |
| 14 | Nathaniel Hawthorne | 2 | Salem native who wrote about witchcraft in the Salem area in an 1835 story, "Young Goodman Brown" |
| 15 | a leaf | 2 | The heroine of an O. Henry story believes she will die when the last one of these falls from the ivy |