American short story master Raymond Carver leads the pack when it comes to writers whose stories appear most frequently in anthologies, but right behind him are John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates.

Literary Hub‘s Emily Temple looked at 20 short fiction anthologies published between 1983 and 2017. She says she also consulted the “best of” and “prize” anthologies. Carver turned up in 15 of them, while Updike and Oates appeared in 14. From there it was Flannery O’Connor (13), Richard Ford and Tim O’Brien (12), John Cheever and Tobias Wolff (11), Donald Barthelme (10), and tied with nine each were James Baldwin, Ann Beattie, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Edgar Allan Poe, and Eudora Welty.

The most frequently anthologized story was Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” (10), followed by Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Kincaid’s “Girl,” and then Carver’s “Cathedral” with seven appearances.

Updike’s stories that appeared in those 14 anthologies were:

“A&P” (3)
“Separating” (2)
“Brother Grasshopper”
“Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car”
“Pigeon Feathers”
“The Lucid Eye in Silver Town”
“The Christian Roommates”
“The Persistence of Desire”
“Gesturing”
“The Brown Chest”
“Here Come the Maples”

It’s worth noting that three of the stories, accounting for four appearances, come from The Maples Stories, a related series of stories based on Updike’s marriage to his first wife, Mary.

“The Most Anthologized Short Stories of All Time: A (Mostly) Definitive List”