Short Stories About Friendship: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about friendship, from Two Friends and The Last Leaf to After Twenty Years and Kabuliwala, summarised with the craft each one shows a writer.
Friendship gets fewer stories than love because it lacks a natural plot: no wedding, no jealousy, no ending built in. The writers here put a friendship under pressure, a siege, a fever, a feud, a twenty-year gap, and watched what held.
The collection opens with friendships that cost a life, moves through the comic and the tender, and finishes with two men whose game matters more than a kingdom. Every title links to a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
Two Friends by Guy de Maupassant. During the siege of Paris two old fishing companions slip past the lines for one afternoon on the river and are captured by Prussians who demand a password they do not know. The officer has their catch fried afterwards.
The Devoted Friend by Oscar Wilde. Little Hans gives the Miller flowers, labour and finally his life, fetching a doctor through a storm, while the Miller lectures on the duties of friendship and gives nothing back. A linnet tells the tale to a water-rat who misses the point.
After Twenty Years by O. Henry. A man waits in a New York doorway for the friend he agreed to meet exactly twenty years earlier, and chats with a passing policeman while he waits. The ending turns on a note handed over under a streetlamp.
The Interlopers by Saki. Two neighbours who have hated each other for generations meet in a disputed forest and are pinned side by side under a falling beech. Trapped, they talk themselves into friendship and shout together for help.
The Last Leaf by O. Henry. Johnsy, ill with pneumonia, decides she will die when the last leaf falls from the ivy outside her window. Old Behrman, the failed painter downstairs, hears of it, and the leaf does not fall.
Kabuliwala by Rabindranath Tagore. A Calcutta writer's five-year-old daughter Mini befriends Rahmun, an Afghan fruit seller who fills her pockets with raisins and nuts. Years later he returns from prison on her wedding day, carrying a paper with a small handprint on it.
The Third Ingredient by O. Henry. Hetty, sacked from a department store, has a piece of beef and no vegetables; the girl at the sink has potatoes and no beef. The onion arrives with a young man who has his own reason to be in the building.
The Final Problem by Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes tells Watson that Moriarty must be destroyed even at the cost of his own life, and the two flee across Europe to the Reichenbach Falls. Watson is called away by a false message and returns to a note.
The Chess Players by Premchand. In Lucknow on the eve of the British annexation, Mirza and Mir play chess from morning to night and hide from their wives to keep playing. The last game, by a ruined mosque, ends with swords.
Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen by O. Henry. Stuffy Pete has already been fed to bursting by two old ladies when the Old Gentleman arrives, as he has for nine years, to buy him dinner. The last line tells us who was hungry.
Reading them together
The collection's argument is that friendship is proved by what one friend keeps from the other. Behrman hides his night in the rain; the Old Gentleman hides his empty stomach; Rahmun keeps his own daughter folded in his pocket. Wilde's Miller is the negative print, a man who speaks constantly of friendship and keeps everything. Premchand's chess players are the darkest case: they keep faith with each other and with nothing else.
Two Friends and The Interlopers make a sharp pair: an old friendship facing a firing squad in silence, and an old hatred turning to friendship in minutes, both met with the same indifference from the world.
If you want to write about friendship
What writers can take from this
- Read The Interlopers and Two Friends back to back; together they take twenty minutes and cover the range of the theme.
- O. Henry has three entries here; notice how each ending redistributes who was helping whom.
- Kabuliwala rewards a second reading once you know what is on the paper Rahmun carries.
- In The Final Problem, watch how Doyle gives Watson the whole emotional weight while Holmes stays brisk.
- The Chess Players is also a story about a city; read it alongside a short history of the 1856 annexation of Awadh if you can.
Try it yourself
Write a story about two friends who meet by arrangement after a long gap, in which one of them arrives carrying something the other must never see.
Questions
What is the best short story about friendship?
The Last Leaf is the most read, and Two Friends the most admired by writers. Kabuliwala is the standard choice in South Asian curricula.
Which short stories about friendship are good for students?
After Twenty Years, The Interlopers, The Last Leaf and Kabuliwala are short, teachable and end in ways that start arguments. The Devoted Friend works well for younger readers as a fable.
Which classic story about friendship is the shortest?
After Twenty Years, at about twelve hundred words. The Interlopers and Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen are each under two thousand.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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