"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.