There is no shortage of short fiction. Across 100 select anthologies published between 1925 and 2017, 297 unique writers authored a total of 632 unique stories.
134 of the writers are men, and 163 are women.
Only 23 of those 297 authors have had their stories republished at least 10 or more times.
Of those 23 writers, seven of them— Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, and Alice Walker—stand out as the most pervasive for four main reasons.
First, the Big 7 are the most frequently republished writers across 100 anthologies.
Second, the Big 7 stand out from these other writers because they all have at least one short story that has been republished more than 10 times.
Third, the Big 7 have at least four stories that appear in Black and majority white collections.
Lastly, the Big 7 have been republished in at least 25 collections since 1990.
Langston Hughes deserves some special attention. Anthology editors republished his stories 42 times. Still, editors never published a story more than 5 times. Thus, Hughes doesn’t have a signature story like the Big 7.
Some writers do have signature stories. Rudolph Fisher’s “City of Refuge,” Ann Petry’s “Like a Winding Sheet,” Dorthy West’s “The Typewriter,” Paule Marshall’s “To Da-duh, in Memoriam,” Ernest Gaines’s “The Sky is Gray,” and William Melvin Kelley’s “The Only Man on Liberty Street” have been republished at least 8 or more times. But they only appear in majority Black collections.
Similarly other writers like Alice Dunbar Nelson, Dorothy West, Edward P. Jones, Eric Walround, Jamaica Kincaid, John Edgar Wideman, and Marita O. Bonner have been republished at least 10 times, but they haven’t been included in black and white collections the same extent as the Big 7.
Only the Big 7, the most frequently republished writers across 100 anthologies, stand out for each having at least one short story republished more than 10 times, having at least four stories featured in both Black and majority white collections, and being republished in a minimum of 25 collections since 1990.
Click on the writers’ head or a story bubble to see where frequently republished stories by these 7 writers appear.