The Most Hazardous Game, also published as "The Hounds of Zaroff," is a short story by Richard Connell. It was published in Collier's on January 19, 1924, with illustrations by Wilmot Emerton Heitland. The story includes a major incident about 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 gets hunted by a Russian nobleman. The story is influenced by the major big game hunting safaris in Africa and South America that were especially popular among rich Americans during the 1920s.The story has been adapted several times, most outstandingly as the 1932 RKO Pictures film The Most Dangerous Game, featuring Joel McCrea, Leslie Banks, and Fay Wray, and for a 1943 episode of the CBS Radio Series Suspense, featuring Orson Welles. It has been known as the most famous short story ever written in English. Simultaneously, the publication won the O. Henry Grant.The Most Hazardous Game is one of many masterpieces that entered the public domain in the US in 2020.
