"The Most Dangerous Game", also published as "The Hounds of Zaroff", is a short story by Richard Connell,[1] first published in Collier's on January 19, 1924, with illustrations by Wilmot Emerton Heitland.[2][3] The story features a big-game hunter from New York City who falls from a yacht and swims to what seems to be an abandoned and isolated island in the Caribbean, where he is hunted by a Russian aristocrat.[4] The story is inspired by the big-game hunting safaris in Africa and South America that were particularly fashionable among wealthy Americans in the 1920s.[5]
The story has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the 1932 RKO Pictures film The Most Dangerous Game, starring Joel McCrea, Leslie Banks and Fay Wray,[6] and for a 1943 episode of the CBS Radio series Suspense, starring Orson Welles.[7] It has been called the "most popular short story ever written in English."[8] Upon its publication, it won the O. Henry Award.[4]
"The Most Dangerous Game" is one of many works that entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.[9]
