Short Stories About Greed: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about greed, from How Much Land Does a Man Need and The Monkey's Paw to The Bottle Imp and The Queen of Spades, summarised and compared.
Greed is the sin fiction likes best because it has a built-in shape: a wish, a bargain, a reckoning. Readers come to these stories half hoping the bargain will work this time, and the writers here know it and play with that hope.
The collection begins with the parable, moves through the devil's contracts and the cursed objects, and ends with two men who lose everything to a card and a sack of gold. Each title links to a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
How Much Land Does a Man Need by Leo Tolstoy. Pahom, a peasant who says he would fear nothing if only he had enough land, is offered as much of the Bashkir steppe as he can walk around in a day. The sun is low when he starts running.
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain. A stranger leaves a sack of gold in an incorruptible town for whoever can repeat a remark once made to him, and nineteen leading citizens each receive a letter telling them the remark. The town hall reading is the set piece.
The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs. A dried paw with three wishes comes into the White household, and Mr White, half joking, wishes for two hundred pounds. The money arrives the next day, as compensation. The story ends with a knocking at the door.
The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving. A miserly Massachusetts man meets Old Scratch in a swamp and, after his wife fails to close the deal, agrees to set up as a moneylender in Boston. He is fetched in the middle of a foreclosure.
The Bottle Imp by Robert Louis Stevenson. Keawe buys a bottle whose imp grants any wish, on the condition that it must always be sold for less than it cost or its owner burns forever. When the price falls to a single centime the story finds its way out.
All Gold Canyon by Jack London. A pocket-miner works a hillside in a silent canyon, digging test holes in a pattern that closes on the gold like an inverted V. When he finds it, a shadow falls across the hole.
The Shroud by Premchand. A father and son sit by a fire while the son's wife dies inside their hut, and the village gives them money for her shroud. They spend it on a feast and argue that the dead do not need cloth.
The Rattrap by Selma Lagerlof. A tramp who sells rattraps steals thirty kronor from a kind crofter and loses his way in the forest. An ironmaster's daughter gives him Christmas dinner under a false name, and he leaves a package behind.
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz by F. Scott Fitzgerald. John Unger spends the summer with a schoolmate whose family owns a Montana mountain made of a single diamond. The father tries to bribe God when the aeroplanes come.
The Queen of Spades by Alexander Pushkin. Hermann, an engineer who has never gambled, learns that an old countess knows three cards that cannot lose and courts her ward to reach her bedroom. He gets the cards, and plays them on three nights.
Reading them together
Together the stories argue that greed is a failure of arithmetic: the greedy cannot count what they already have. Tolstoy states it as a parable and Twain as a farce, but the shape is the same, a town or a peasant discovering that the sum they wanted was the sum that destroyed them. The bargain stories, Jacobs, Irving, Stevenson, add the clause the greedy always skip.
Premchand and Lagerlof sit at the edges. The Shroud shows greed born of hunger so total that judgement feels indecent, while The Rattrap is the one story here where the greedy man is offered a way back and takes it.
If you want to write about greed
What writers can take from this
- Read How Much Land Does a Man Need first; everything else here is a variation on its last line.
- Pair The Monkey's Paw with The Bottle Imp for two answers to the question of how a wish can be undone.
- Twain's Hadleyburg is long; read the town hall scene aloud if you can.
- In The Shroud, resist the urge to judge Ghisu until the last page, and notice how Premchand makes that hard.
- The Rattrap works well for younger readers; its Christmas setting hides how sharp it is.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character is given exactly what they asked for, in the exact words they used, and spends the rest of the story discovering what the words left out.
Questions
What is the best short story about greed?
How Much Land Does a Man Need is the standard answer and the one Joyce reportedly called the greatest story ever written. The Monkey's Paw is the most read in schools.
Which short stories about greed are good for students?
The Monkey's Paw, How Much Land Does a Man Need, The Rattrap and The Devil and Tom Walker are short and clear, with moral questions students can argue about.
Which classic story about greed is the shortest?
The Monkey's Paw and The Shroud are each around three thousand words. All Gold Canyon is longer but almost wordless in its middle section.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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