Literary history is full of borrowed ideas. “Stole” is a strong word for it, though, and in most of these cases it doesn’t quite fit. Some writers admitted what they took. Others were accused, and the question was never fully settled.
The eight cases below are documented borrowings, suspected influences, or disputed claims. Where the evidence is thin, I’ve said so. A couple of the sources weren’t strictly short stories, and I’ve flagged those too.
William Shakespeare and Cinthio’s Venetian Tale
Othello didn’t come out of nowhere. An Italian writer, Giovanni Battista Giraldi, known as Cinthio, wrote a short story in 1565 titled Un Capitano Moro, and historians have noted it shares elements with Othello. The tale appeared in his collection Hecatommithi, and few English readers ever came across it.
The overlap is considerable. Commentators point to the plot, characters, certain names, setting and moral. Shakespeare was also working before modern copyright rules, so reusing a published tale was ordinary practice for a playwright of his era.
Nella Larsen and the Story Called Mrs. Adis
Few borrowing disputes cost a writer as much as this one. Larsen’s 1930 short story “Sanctuary” became her most controversial piece, and the plagiarism claim that followed was a scandal from which she never quite recovered. The older work in question was “Mrs. Adis,” by British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith, published eight years earlier.
Larsen defended herself in print. She claimed the story reached her as folklore. The picture is muddier than a simple theft, since Kaye-Smith herself said she first found the story in an account by a seventeenth century French bishop. Scholars still debate who, if anyone, owned it.
Jeffrey Archer and a Collection Built on Twists
Jeffrey Archer made a career of the last page surprise. A Twist in the Tale is a 1988 collection of short stories by the British author. The book is a good example of how heavily twist driven short fiction leans on a handful of familiar setups.
One of its stories drew a formal complaint. It was the subject of a plagiarism claim by author Kathleen Burnett in 1988. The source material I found doesn’t give the outcome, so it’s best treated as an allegation rather than a finding.
Jack London and the Plots He Bought
London was prolific, and he wasn’t shy about outsourcing ideas. One of his methods was handing a young talent a little cash in exchange for plot advice. That young writer was Sinclair Lewis, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
This was a paid arrangement, not a secret theft. Still, it shows that a plot twist credited to a famous name could start life in someone else’s notebook. The practice was open enough that it became a well known footnote in both men’s biographies.
Robert Louis Stevenson and Washington Irving
Treasure Island is often called the blueprint for pirate adventure. Stevenson himself was open about the debts, writing in his essay “My First Book” that Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveller and Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Gold-Bug” fed into it. Irving’s pirate lore gave him a model for the buried treasure and the menacing old sailor.
That candor matters. Stevenson didn’t hide the sources, and he reshaped them into something new. The result is a case of acknowledged borrowing, which is a different thing from stealing.
Washington Irving and a German Folktale
Irving wasn’t just a source for others. His story “Rip Van Winkle,” published in 1819, rests on an older European tale of a man who sleeps for years and wakes to a changed world. Scholars commonly link it to a German folktale usually titled Peter Klaus, retold in the early 1800s.
Irving added a note that the story was founded on a German tradition. He moved the setting to the Catskills and gave it a new voice. The central surprise, the long sleep, was inherited, while the American setting and comic tone were his own.
Vladimir Nabokov and the Other Lolita
This one is a suspected influence, not a proven theft. In 1916 a German writer using the name Heinz von Lichberg published a short story called “Lolita,” about a man drawn to a young girl of that name. Scholar Michael Maar drew attention to it in a 2004 book, arguing it may have lodged in Nabokov’s memory.
Nabokov published his novel Lolita in 1955. He never acknowledged the earlier story, and nobody has shown that he read it. It stays a striking coincidence of title and premise, and the debate is unresolved.
George Orwell and Zamyatin’s We
This case comes with a caveat, because the source was a novel and not a short story. Zamyatin’s We was a little known work in the English speaking world when Orwell reviewed it. That review came in 1946, three years before Nineteen Eighty Four was published, and Orwell praised Zamyatin’s grasp of politics and the dehumanized individual.
The two books share a target, which is totalitarian control. Some argue that both being critiques of totalitarianism is simply part of a larger genre. Orwell read the earlier book openly, and critics still disagree over how much of 1984 grew from it.
