Short Stories About Death: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about death, from The Death of Ivan Ilyich to The Story of an Hour and The Fly, summarised and compared for readers and writers.
Readers come to stories about death for two opposite reasons: to rehearse their own, and to understand what the living do afterwards. The stories here are split accordingly. Half sit inside the dying person; half stay with the survivors, in a kitchen, a garden, an office.
The order runs from the deathbed outward: first the dying, then the newly bereaved, then the people who carry on as if nothing has happened. Each title links to a page that summarises the story in full, ending included.
The stories
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. A successful judge injures his side while hanging curtains in a new flat and spends months dying while his family and colleagues pretend otherwise. Only the peasant servant Gerasim, who holds his legs up for hours, treats death as ordinary.
The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin. Louise Mallard is told gently that her husband has died in a rail accident and, alone in her room, feels something she did not expect. The ending turns on a front door opening.
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe. Prince Prospero walls a thousand courtiers into an abbey to outlast a plague and throws a masked ball in seven coloured rooms. Each hour an ebony clock stops the music, and at midnight a new guest arrives.
The Fly by Katherine Mansfield. A prosperous boss, reminded of his son killed six years before in the war, finds he cannot weep. He rescues a fly from his inkwell and then drops ink on it, once, twice, and then a third time.
The Dead by James Joyce. At the end of a Dublin party Gabriel Conroy learns that his wife once loved a boy who died young, and lies awake as snow falls across Ireland. The story is about the dead's claim on the living.
Odour of Chrysanthemums by D. H. Lawrence. Elizabeth Bates waits with growing anger for her husband to come home from the pit, assuming he is drinking. He is carried in dead, and as she and his mother wash the body she understands they were strangers.
The Law of Life by Jack London. Old Koskoosh is left beside a small fire when his tribe moves on, as custom requires. He counts the sticks he has left and listens to the wolves close in, remembering a moose he once saw brought down.
The Shroud by Premchand. Ghisu and his son Madhav sit by a fire while Madhav's wife dies in childbirth inside the hut. Given money by the village for a shroud, they spend it on food and liquor and reason that she will be covered one way or another.
The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield. On the morning of the Sheridans' party a carter from the lane below is killed, and Laura wants it cancelled. It goes ahead; that evening she carries a basket of leftovers to the widow's cottage and is shown the body.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. A Confederate sympathiser stands on a railway bridge with a noose around his neck while Union soldiers prepare to hang him. The rope, the river and his escape are described with a clarity the ending makes terrible.
Reading them together
Together the collection argues that death is the one event fiction cannot narrate from inside, so writers narrate its edges. Tolstoy gets closest and still has to hand the last moments to a kind of light. Bierce and Chopin stretch a few seconds into a whole story, and both make the stretch itself the point. Mansfield never shows the dying at all; The Fly and The Garden Party are about the strange fact that the living keep their appointments.
Compare Gerasim in Ivan Ilyich with Ghisu in The Shroud. One serves the dying with tenderness, the other ignores the dying entirely, and neither writer allows the reader an easy verdict on the peasant's response.
If you want to write about death
What writers can take from this
- Read The Story of an Hour first; at a thousand words it sets up every question the longer stories answer.
- Pair The Fly with The Garden Party to see how Mansfield approaches the same subject from an old man and a young girl.
- In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, mark where the point of view narrows from society to one man's room.
- The Shroud is often read as social satire; read it once as a story about grief refused.
- Do not read the Poe and Bierce together late at night unless you mean to.
Try it yourself
Write a story that covers the hour after a death in a household, in which nobody says the dead person's name and the reader learns everything about them from what is left undone.
Questions
What is the best short story about death?
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is usually named first, though it is really a novella. Among true short stories, The Story of an Hour and An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge are the most taught.
Which short stories about death are good for students?
The Story of an Hour, The Fly, The Law of Life and The Masque of the Red Death are compact and full of symbols students can trace. The Garden Party suits discussions of class and grief.
Which classic story about death is the shortest?
The Story of an Hour, at roughly a thousand words. The Fly and The Law of Life are each under three thousand.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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