The Most Dangerous Game

"The Most Dangerous Game" (also published as "The Hounds of Zaroff") is a short story by American writer Richard Connell, first published in Collier's on January 19, 1924, with illustrations by Wilmot Emerton Heitland. The story features an American big-game hunter who falls from a ship and swims to a mysterious Caribbean island where he is hunted by a Russian aristocrat. The story is inspired by the big-game hunting safaris fashionable among wealthy Americans in the 1920s.

It has been called the "most popular short story ever written in English" and won the O. Henry Award shortly after its publication. The story has been adapted many times for film, radio, and television. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.