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I have about nine non-sf anthologies, published from 1939 through 1969, that try in various ways to include the most famous and/or best-loved short stories from the mid-1800s onward. Each book contains between 20 and 100 stories. (Most of these belonged to my father.)

And as I work my way through my unread books, I keep noticing that various stories overlap among these anthologies.

So I made a spreadsheet, showing which stories appear in which of these books. There are 316 stories listed—about 70 of which appear in more than one of these 9 books—written by 200 different authors. I think about 30 of those authors are women. There’s only 1 author here who I’m sure was a POC (Richard Wright), and his story appears in only one of the books.

(Some of the books divide the authors by nationality—there are significant contingents of Russian, French, British, Irish, and American authors, among others. All of the stories are presented in English.)

I’m sure that there were other anthologies published during that period that had similar aims, so I don’t want to try to draw too many conclusions here. But I’m inclined to say that the 70 or so stories that appear in more than one anthology listed here—and especially the 15 or so that appear in more than two of them—constitute a reasonable approximation of the Western canon of short stories as seen by mid-20th-century white mainstream anthologists.

(Feel free to try to guess what some of the multiply-anthologized stories are, before you look at the spreadsheet. I would have guessed at least one story that isn’t on the list at all, and at least one other that appears only once.)

(Note: There’s a racial epithet that appears in two of the story titles; I’ve replaced most of the letters in that word with a dash.)