Two sisters start a cleaning business with one vacuum and a borrowed car.Costs: their knees, and the friend who lent the car. Ends: the tenth van carries the first vacuum.
A couple signs a thirty-year mortgage and writes the date of the last payment inside a closet door.Costs: thirty years in the same two jobs. Ends: they cross the date off together and repaint the closet.
Three friends open a restaurant together and agree on everything except what kind.Costs: two of the friendships. Ends: the third friend runs it alone, with three menus stapled together.
A baker makes the best bread in town, and the town wants it cheaper than she can make it.Costs: the recipe, cut twice. Ends: she closes rather than cut it again, and bakes for her street on Saturdays.
A barber cuts hair on his porch until he can rent a chair, then a room, then the building.Costs: he has never taken a trip. Ends: he owns the block and still sweeps the floor himself.
A bookseller opens in a town that has never had a bookshop, and learns why.Costs: a year of sales he can count on his fingers. Ends: the shop becomes a lending library, and he its keeper.
A candy maker is offered a fortune to put his name on a factory's boxes.Costs: the taste; the factory changes the recipe. Ends: rich, he buys back one shop and may not use his name on it.
A couple opens a diner with one grill and eleven stools, and for a year they are its only staff.Costs: every Sunday of that year. Ends: they hire a cook and do not know what to do with a day off.
A family keeps a corner store open sixteen hours a day, and the children do homework behind the register.Costs: nobody ever eats supper together. Ends: the store closes early once a year, for a graduation.
A farmer's daughter sells eggs from a wagon and writes down what each customer wishes she sold.Costs: her evenings, spent on the list. Ends: at thirty the general store is hers, stocked from the notebook.
A girl takes over her father's failing plant nursery and grows what the customers' grandparents grew.Costs: her place at college, given up. Ends: the nursery pays for her to go at twenty-six.
A man buys a motel on a road that the new highway is about to bypass.Costs: everything he has. Ends: the cars stop coming, and his own family are the only guests it ever fills with.
A man mortgages his house to open a hardware store, one year before a chain builds on the highway.Costs: the house, nearly. Ends: he closes, and the chain hires him to run its key counter, which he does well.
A man sells ice from a cart and sees the first refrigerators arrive in a shop window.Costs: his trade. Ends: he is the first on his street to repair them, and keeps the cart for parades.
A mechanic works double shifts for six years to buy the garage he works in, and the owner sells to someone else.Costs: six years of doubles. Ends: the buyer makes him manager, and he starts saving for a different garage.
A photographer opens a portrait studio the year everyone in town gets a camera.Costs: a lease signed for five years. Ends: she teaches the town to use its cameras, which pays less and suits her.
A seamstress saves for a dress shop of her own, and each year its price rises faster than her savings.Costs: twenty years of looking in one window. Ends: her dresses hang in it, under another name.
A shoe repairer teaches the trade to an apprentice, who opens a cheaper shop across the street.Costs: half his customers. Ends: neither shop lasts; the two share one market stall, and that works.
A street musician turns down a steady job and opens a music shop instead.Costs: his own best guitar, sold for the first month's rent. Ends: a pupil buys it back for him ten years on.
A tailor paints and Sons on his shop sign before he has asked either son.Costs: the argument on opening day. Ends: the sign is repainted for his daughter, who had been waiting.
A teenager fixes bicycles in his mother's garage and refuses to raise his prices.Costs: the garage, the driveway, then the lawn. Ends: his mother charges him rent, and he can pay it.
A widow turns her front room into a hat shop because it is the only room that faces the street.Costs: her privacy; customers can see her supper. Ends: they ask about the supper, and she adds a lunch counter.
A woman sells hot lunches from a cooler at a bus stop and saves for a cart, then a window, then a door.Costs: four in the morning, for nine years. Ends: her restaurant opens across from the same bus stop.
A woman who arrived speaking no English opens a language school in the room where she learned it.Costs: ten years of night classes. Ends: her first teacher enrolls, to learn her language.
An inventor quits his job to sell a kitchen gadget that everyone admires and nobody buys.Costs: his savings and two years. Ends: he goes back to the job; the gadget still hangs in his own kitchen.
Three friends open a restaurant together and agree on everything except what kind.Costs: two of the friendships. Ends: the third friend runs it alone, with three menus stapled together.
Two brothers sell hot dogs outside a ballpark and are forever one good season away from a real restaurant.Costs: nine summers. Ends: the tenth is the good one, and the restaurant keeps the cart by its door.
Two sisters start a cleaning business with one vacuum and a borrowed car.Costs: their knees, and the friend who lent the car. Ends: the tenth van carries the first vacuum.
The one who moves to the city 25
A boy arrives in the city to live with an uncle whose letters turn out to have overstated things.Costs: his wages, which go to the uncle's rent. Ends: the boy's own letters home are honest, and still hopeful.
A boy who shines shoes outside a bank tells every customer that he will work inside it one day.Costs: six years of the same men laughing. Ends: he is hired as a messenger, and the story stops at the door.
A carpenter moves to the city because that is where the building is, and finds that it is all done in steel.Costs: his tools are the wrong ones. Ends: he never builds a tower; he makes the models the architects show.
A country doctor's daughter moves to the city to study medicine at a school that has never admitted a woman.Costs: four years alone in the front row. Ends: she graduates, and the row behind her is no longer empty.
A couple moves to the city for one year to save money and stays for forty.Costs: the farm, sold to a neighbor. Ends: they retire to the country at last and find they are city people.
A family leaves a failed farm for a city three states away, in a truck with the stove tied on top.Costs: everything that would not fit on the truck. Ends: the stove is the first thing set up in the new kitchen.
A family of six crosses an ocean and shares two rooms above a laundry with the cousins who sent for them.Costs: the grandmother stays behind. Ends: the first letter home that does not ask for anything.
A farm girl takes the train to the city with one address in her pocket, and the address is a vacant lot.Costs: her first week's money, on a room. Ends: she is hired to help build what goes up on the lot.
A fiddler comes to the city where the music is and finds ten thousand others who came for the same reason.Costs: his certainty that he was the best. Ends: he goes home the best in three counties, and teaches.
A girl from the mountains gets work as a telephone operator and is told to lose her accent.Costs: her mother no longer knows her voice on the line. Ends: she is promoted, and talks the old way on Sundays.
A girl takes a room in a boarding house where every lodger has a plan and the landlady has heard them all.Costs: the landlady's doubt, daily. Ends: hers is the one plan the landlady asks to put money in.
A girl wins a scholarship to a city school and is the first from her town to go.Costs: the town expects a doctor back. Ends: she comes back a teacher, by choice, and the town takes a while.
A man leaves for the city to get away from his family's name and finds that nobody there knows any name.Costs: he is nobody, as he wanted. Ends: he writes home for the first time, to be called by it.
A man moves to the city to earn enough to go home rich, and every year he sets the date a year later.Costs: his village grows up without him. Ends: on a visit home he is given directions, as a tourist.
A man writes home that the streets are paved with gold, and his cousin believes him and comes.Costs: the cousin's passage, borrowed. Ends: the two of them pave streets for a living and laugh about it.
A newcomer learns the city by riding a different streetcar to its last stop every Sunday.Costs: the Sunday dinners he was invited to. Ends: he becomes a driver, on the line with the best view.
A sailor leaves the sea for a job on the city docks and marries on dry land.Costs: he never sees his home port again. Ends: his children can see ships from the window, and want offices.
A small-town reporter joins a city paper to write the big stories and is given the weather.Costs: his byline; the weather has none. Ends: he goes home, buys the small paper and prints his name large.
A woman arrives with a trunk of her mother's recipes and a job cooking food she has never tasted.Costs: cooking one way at work and another at home. Ends: her employers ask for what she makes at home.
A woman moves to the city for a job that is gone by the time her train gets in.Costs: the fare, which was everything. Ends: she takes the first work offered and never does what she came for.
A young clerk rents a room so small that he can touch both walls, and writes home that it has a view.Costs: seven years in the room. Ends: his next apartment does have a view, and he misses the walls.
A young man leaves his small town to be an actor and becomes the best waiter on the avenue.Costs: eleven years of auditions. Ends: he buys the restaurant, and the theater crowd eats there.
A young woman takes a factory job in the city to put her brother through school.Costs: her own schooling. Ends: he graduates and offers to pay for hers; she takes the money for a shop instead.
Two brothers go to the city together, and only one of them likes it.Costs: each other's company. Ends: one goes back to the farm, and each thinks the other got the better life.
Two friends from one village meet by chance in the city after ten years, one rich and one not.Costs: one awkward dinner. Ends: each envies something the other has, and they go into business with both.
The family buying a house 25
A couple buys a lot in a development that so far exists only as a billboard.Costs: two years in a trailer beside a stake in the ground. Ends: theirs is the first house, and they name the road.
A couple buys land to build on someday and visits it every year with a picnic.Costs: only the taxes. Ends: they never build, and the picnic spot is where the family still gathers.
A couple buys the house with the white fence and discovers that the fence belongs to the neighbor.Costs: a year of politeness at the property line. Ends: the fence comes down, and the yards do better as one.
A couple pays off the house in the year the last child moves too far away to visit.Costs: the years they worked instead of talking. Ends: they sell it and follow the children, in a camper.
A couple signs a thirty-year mortgage and writes the date of the last payment inside a closet door.Costs: thirty years in the same two jobs. Ends: they cross the date off together and repaint the closet.
A family buys a house for its school district, and the district line is moved.Costs: the stretch they made to afford it. Ends: the children do well at the other school, to everyone's confusion.
A family buys the biggest house it can borrow for and rents out room after room to keep it.Costs: the dining room, then the porch. Ends: they live in two rooms of their own house, among lodgers.
A family buys the worst house on the best street.Costs: ten years of the neighbors' glances. Ends: theirs is the garden the street's visitors stop at.
A family is the first on its street to own a car, a television and a mower, each bought on credit.Costs: three payments, due on three days. Ends: the things go back one at a time, and the street helps carry.
A family is turned down by three banks and builds on land a great-uncle left, one room at a time.Costs: living in one room, then two. Ends: the fourth room is a porch, and nobody owes a cent on it.
A family moves into a new suburb where every house is the same, and paints its door red.Costs: a letter from the committee. Ends: by spring the street has nine colors of door.
A family moves to a bigger house every five years and never unpacks the last boxes.Costs: the children's friends, four times. Ends: the youngest refuses to move again, and the boxes are opened.
A family wins a house in a raffle and cannot afford to heat it.Costs: one winter spent in coats. Ends: they sell it for a small one and the first savings they have ever had.
A father promises his daughter a room of her own by her tenth birthday.Costs: overtime, and missing the birthday. Ends: she has the room at twelve and would trade it for the two years.
A grandmother who has rented all her life is left a house by a woman she cleaned for.Costs: the town's opinion of the will. Ends: she moves in, and keeps the old lady's chair where it stood.
A man builds his own house on weekends, and it takes eleven years.Costs: every weekend of his children's childhood. Ends: they are grown when it is done, and bring their own children.
A man buys his parents the house they always wanted, and they do not want to leave their apartment.Costs: his pride. Ends: he lives in the house himself; they visit on Sundays and are home by six.
A man keeps up the payments on a house by not telling his family that he has lost his job.Costs: a year of leaving at eight with a lunchbox. Ends: his wife has known since March, and they sell together.
A man works two jobs to keep a house that his family is never all home in at once.Costs: he knows the house mostly in the dark. Ends: they sell it for a smaller one and eat breakfast together.
A nurse who has lived in hospital quarters for twenty years buys a house with a door only she has the key to.Costs: twenty years of saving on a nurse's pay. Ends: she locks it the first night, then unlocks it, to hear it.
A tired landlord offers a renter the whole building at a price that is almost possible.Costs: borrowing from every tenant in it. Ends: the building is owned by the people who live there.
A woman buys the house that she and her mother used to clean.Costs: the former owners still use her first name. Ends: she keeps the front door open, as it never was.
A woman saves for a down payment in a coffee can for fourteen years.Costs: every small treat of those years. Ends: the banker counts it twice, and the can goes on the mantel.
Newlyweds buy a house with a crack in the foundation because it is the only one they can afford.Costs: every weekend spent under the house. Ends: he becomes the man the whole street calls about cracks.
Three generations pool their money for one house with one kitchen.Costs: nobody ever cooks unobserved. Ends: the kitchen is the room every grandchild describes first.
The children handed the dream 25
A boy delivers newspapers to the big houses on the hill and counts their windows.Costs: the hill is steep, and he is never asked in. Ends: he buys the smallest one and waves at the paper boy.
A boy inherits his father's farm and his father's debts in the same envelope.Costs: his plans for the city. Ends: he sells half to clear the debts and farms the rest his own way.
A boy is given a president's name by parents who mean it as a plan.Costs: every teacher's joke. Ends: he is elected, to the school board, and his parents frame the ballot.
A couple who pick fruit follow the harvest, and their daughter attends eleven schools in six years.Costs: she is always the new girl. Ends: she gives the graduation speech at the twelfth and names all eleven.
A daughter becomes the doctor her parents dreamed of and finds she does not like the work.Costs: twelve years of training. Ends: she teaches instead, and her parents call her a professor of doctors.
A daughter is raised to marry well and learns to fly airplanes instead.Costs: her mother's guest list. Ends: her mother's first flight, as a passenger, with her eyes shut.
A daughter is the first in her family to go to college, and four relatives wait outside on every exam day.Costs: she cannot fail in private. Ends: the diploma hangs in her grandmother's hall, not her own.
A family's hopes ride on the eldest, and it is the overlooked middle child who makes the fortune.Costs: the eldest's idea of who he is. Ends: the middle child hires him, carefully.
A father and son share one good suit: the father's interviews first, then the son's.Costs: they can never go out on the same night. Ends: the son's first pay buys his father a suit of his own.
A father builds a business to hand to his children, and none of the three wants it.Costs: his picture of the future. Ends: he sells to his foreman's daughter, who has wanted it since she was nine.
A girl grows up hearing how much was given up so that she could have choices, and feels she has none.Costs: honesty at home. Ends: she says so, and her father answers that the choices were the point, even this one.
A girl is told she can be anything and takes it literally, changing her mind every year.Costs: her parents' patience. Ends: at thirty she has done six jobs well and is hired because of it.
A girl keeps the accounts for her parents' market stall from the age of ten, in a school notebook.Costs: her Saturdays. Ends: she trains as an accountant, and takes the notebook to her first interview.
A girl translates for her parents at the bank, the clinic and the school from the age of eight.Costs: she hears every worry meant for adults. Ends: she is the family's first graduate, in languages.
A grandfather cannot read, and his granddaughter learns at school and teaches him at the kitchen table.Costs: his pride, for a month. Ends: he reads her name aloud from the program at her graduation.
A grandmother's savings can send one grandchild to medical school, and the four cousins draw straws.Costs: the other three cousins' chance. Ends: the doctor pays for the whole next generation.
A man reaches everything his parents wanted for him and visits the old neighborhood to feel proud.Costs: nobody there knows him. Ends: he stays for supper at the one door that does, and comes back monthly.
A mother cleans offices at night in the building where her daughter will one day work.Costs: they pass in the lobby at six, one leaving, one arriving. Ends: the daughter takes the office her mother picked.
A son changes the family name to get a job, and gets it.Costs: the name; his father stops signing his letters. Ends: his own daughter takes the old name back.
A son is sent to law school by a father who drove a cab to pay for it, and he wants to be a cook.Costs: one terrible dinner. Ends: the restaurant's first customer is his father, who orders twice.
A star pitcher is his town's one hope of fame, until the scouts choose a boy from the next town.Costs: the town's attention, gone within a week. Ends: he coaches the youngest team and likes the game again.
The children of a self-made man are given everything he lacked, and lack the one thing he had.Costs: his respect, and they can tell. Ends: the youngest leaves with nothing, on purpose, to go and find it.
Parents save for a piano and lessons, and the child they bought them for has no ear at all.Costs: six years of scales. Ends: the younger brother, never taught, plays it when nobody is home.
Twin brothers are given the same chances, and only one takes them.Costs: the family's habit of saying the boys. Ends: the other finds a smaller life, and is the one who sleeps well.
Two parents who never finished school check their son's homework every night without being able to read it.Costs: he lets them think they are helping. Ends: at graduation he thanks them for checking, and means it.
How it works
These 100 American Dream story ideas are about people who want a better life than the one they were handed: a first shop, a move to the city, a house with a mortgage, a dream passed on to the children.
Read the full guide
Sorted by who is dreaming
The shopkeeper pays in hours, the newcomer to the city in what was left behind, the homebuyer in years at the same job. In the fourth group the dream belongs to the parents and the bill goes to the children, which is where the arguments are.
Whether the dream holds
In 51 of the 100 the dreamer gets what they set out for, at a price. In the other 49 they do not, and the last line says what they have instead: a lending library where the bookshop failed, a picnic spot on the land nobody built on.
Decide the cost before the ending. A dream that costs nothing is only a wish.
Choose one object that stands for arriving: a key, a shop sign, a coffee can on the mantel.
Questions and answers
What is the American Dream?
The phrase names a shared ideal of the United States: that anyone is free, and has the chance, to do well and live better. Its personal side includes home ownership and upward mobility.
Where does the phrase American Dream come from?
James Truslow Adams popularized it in 1931, during the Great Depression, in his book The Epic of America. He wrote of a land where life should be better, richer and fuller for everyone, and said it was more than motor cars and high wages.
Does an American Dream story have to end well?
No, and nearly half of these do not. A man buys a motel on a road the new highway is about to bypass. A daughter becomes the doctor her parents dreamed of and finds she does not like the work.
How do you write a story about the American Dream?
Give one person a specific want, then send the bill. A couple signs a thirty-year mortgage and writes the date of the last payment inside a closet door. The story is the thirty years.