All the Good People I’ve Left Behind is a collection of short stories written by Joyce Carol Oates.

[3][4] The title story of the volume exemplifies the thematic scope of the entire collection; and its importance is already indicated by its length.

It deals with the development of two couples, the Enrights and the Mandels, who both studied at the University of Michigan in 1960; and each of the story's episodes focuses on their situation in 1960, 1963, 1968, 1973, and 1976, revealing both their public lives, their careers, professional successes and failures, and their private sphere, their psychic problems, affairs, and gradual alienation from each other.

Their common background and the resultant interrelation of the individual stories suggests that they have to be seen as representatives of that part of the generation which grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, had a higher education and established itself more or less successfully as the upper middle-class in the 1960s and early 1970s.

But this volume not only reflects the development of this part of contemporary American society, it also depicts the social, economic, and cultural background of the 1960s and early 1970s; and contrary to the previous collections, Oates pays much more attention to the influence of these factors on the lives of the individual characters.