Greed

Short Stories and Poems About Greed: Tales of Wanting Too Much

Few themes have endured in storytelling like greed. From ancient Greek myths and Aesop’s fables to Victorian ghost stories and modern fairy tales, writers have returned again and again to the same uncomfortable question: what happens when wanting more becomes the only thing we know? The stories and poems collected here gather some of the most memorable answers—golden touches that turn deadly, wishes that backfire, hoarded fortunes that buy nothing of value, and the rare characters who learn, just in time, that enough is its own kind of treasure.

Short Stories About Greed

1. A Christmas Carol
Ebenezer Scrooge is the literary archetype of greed—a man so consumed by money he has hardened his heart against family, friends, and the festive spirit of Christmas. When three ghosts force him to look at his past, present, and future, he is given one last chance to choose generosity over hoarding. A redemption story that has shaped how readers imagine avarice for nearly two centuries.

2. King Midas
A king’s wish that everything he touches turn to gold sounds glorious—until he embraces his daughter and realises the cost of his desire. This retelling of the Greek myth turns one of antiquity’s sharpest warnings about avarice into a story young readers can take to heart.

3. The Goose and the Golden Egg
A farmer’s prized goose lays a single golden egg each day, and that should be more than enough. But impatience and greed push him to slaughter the bird in search of the treasure he imagines inside, losing everything in the process. A short fable whose moral has outlasted entire civilisations.

4. The Story of the Fisherman and His Wife
A poor fisherman releases an enchanted flounder, and his wife begins demanding ever-greater rewards—a cottage, a castle, a crown, godlike power. With each wish granted, the sea grows darker and stormier, until greed reaches a point that cannot be sustained. A fairy tale whose escalating structure makes the lesson unforgettable.

5. The Monkey’s Paw
A family is offered three wishes by way of a shrivelled monkey’s paw, and what begins as a quiet evening’s curiosity ends in something far darker. Greed for money, then for what cannot be undone, drives one of the most enduring horror stories in English literature.

6. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
From the 1001 Arabian Nights, this enduring tale follows a humble woodcutter who discovers the cave of a band of thieves with the secret words “Open Sesame.” His brother’s lust for the same treasure leads to ruin, sharpening the contrast between modest gain and reckless want.

7. The Diamond Necklace
A discontented Parisian woman borrows a glittering necklace to feel briefly equal to the rich she envies. When she loses it, she and her husband spend a decade repaying the debt—only to discover the truth at the end. Maupassant’s sting-in-the-tail classic on vanity and material craving.

Poems About Greed

1. Raising the Devil: A Legend of Cornelius Agrippa
A darkly comic narrative poem from the Ingoldsby Legends, in which a curious student raids his master’s forbidden books and pays a steep price for his hunger for knowledge and power. Gothic, witty, and quietly cautionary, with the rolling rhyme that made Barham a Victorian favourite.

2. King John’s Christmas
A.A. Milne’s mischievous rhyming poem follows a lonely, unloved king who is overlooked at Christmas and writes ever-more-demanding letters to Santa Claus. Funny on the surface, gently pointed underneath—about how greed and self-pity can blind us to the small kindnesses we actually receive.

Related Themes

Stories about greed rarely sit alone; they pull in companions like envy, ambition, vanity, and the slow workings of karma. If this collection draws you in, the following themes will lead you to many of the same authors and the same uncomfortable, satisfying questions:

• Karma & Consequences — tales where every choice quietly returns to its maker.
• Money & Rich and Poor — stories that turn wealth and want into characters of their own.
• Envy & Jealousy — the close cousins of greed, often the spark behind it.
• Moral & Punishment — fables and fairy tales where the lesson is built into the ending.