Short Stories About Poverty: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about poverty, from The Little Match Girl and The Overcoat to The Shroud, Deliverance and A Piece of Steak, summarised and compared.
Stories about poverty are read by people who have been poor, to see it told right, and by people who have not, to understand what they missed. The writers here mostly refuse pity; they count coins, calories and hours of sleep and let the arithmetic do the accusing.
The collection begins with the cold, moves through the city and the village, and ends with a boxer who loses a fight for want of a steak. Each title links to a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. On the last night of the year a barefoot child who has sold nothing dares not go home, and strikes her matches one by one against a wall for warmth. Each flame shows her a room she cannot enter.
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. Akaky Akakievich, a copying clerk, gives up tea and candles for months to afford a new coat and is robbed of it the first night he wears it. The Important Person he appeals to shouts him out of the office.
The Cop and the Anthem by O. Henry. Soapy, feeling winter coming, tries six times to get himself arrested so he can spend three months warm on Blackwell's Island. The police will not oblige until he stops trying.
The Shroud by Premchand. Ghisu and Madhav, the laziest men in the village, sit by a fire while Madhav's wife dies in labour inside, and next morning collect money for her funeral cloth. They spend it on a meal in town and defend the decision at length.
The Price of Milk by Premchand. Bhungi, a sweeper woman, nurses a landlord's infant son with her own milk while her own child waits. Years later that child, orphaned, lives under a neem tree outside the landlord's house with a dog for company.
Deliverance by Premchand. Dukhi the tanner goes to the village priest to have a date fixed for his daughter's betrothal and is set to chopping a knotted log in the sun without food. The priest's problem afterward is how to move what is left in his yard.
A Pair of Silk Stockings by Kate Chopin. Little Mrs Sommers comes into fifteen dollars and plans to spend it on the children's clothes, then sits down to rest at a counter of silk stockings. The afternoon that follows is the only one she has ever had.
Twenty-Six Men and a Girl by Maxim Gorky. Twenty-six pretzel bakers in a damp basement worship the sixteen-year-old Tanya who comes each morning for bread. A handsome soldier boasts he can have her, and the men, appalled, wait to see.
The Skylight Room by O. Henry. Miss Leeson, a typist, takes the cheapest room in the house, a cell under the roof, and names a star she can see through the skylight after a man who does not exist. One night she does not come down for supper.
A Piece of Steak by Jack London. Tom King, an ageing boxer, walks to his fight on bread and gravy because the butcher would not extend credit for the steak he needed. He nearly wins, and walks home knowing exactly why he did not.
Reading them together
The collection's argument is that poverty is a matter of small sums, and that fiction about it should be able to show its accounts. Gogol itemises the coat; London itemises the steak; Chopin itemises fifteen dollars to the cent. The three Premchand stories go further and show poverty as a caste condition, where the sum can never be earned because the debt is to a system rather than a shop.
Set The Little Match Girl against The Cop and the Anthem. Both take place as winter arrives, both protagonists want a warm room, and one writer offers heaven while the other offers a joke; neither offers a room.
If you want to write about poverty
What writers can take from this
- Read The Little Match Girl and The Skylight Room together; they are the same story a century apart.
- The three Premchand stories can be read in an hour and make a course in themselves.
- A Piece of Steak is long for the theme; read it for the round-by-round account, which is the argument.
- In The Overcoat, mark the pages Gogol spends on the tailor Petrovich; the coat is a character.
- Twenty-Six Men and a Girl works best read straight through, in the basement's own rhythm.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character comes into a small sum of money, exactly enough for one necessary thing, and spends it on something else, and let the reader decide whether they were wrong.
Questions
What is the best short story about poverty?
The Overcoat is the standard, and The Shroud the most discussed in South Asian classrooms. The Little Match Girl is the one everyone knows.
Which short stories about poverty are good for students?
The Cop and the Anthem, The Little Match Girl, Deliverance and A Pair of Silk Stockings are short and clear, with endings that start discussion. The Overcoat suits longer study.
Which classic story about poverty is the shortest?
The Little Match Girl, at about a thousand words. A Pair of Silk Stockings and The Cop and the Anthem are each around two thousand.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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