Samad Behrangi (1939-1968), a leftist revolutionary writer, educator, and folklorist, played a major role in the history of modern Iranian literature. His short story “The Little Black Fish” (1968) is considered a classic -- a significant political allegory that ushered in a new generation of children’s literature -- but in recent decades its status has declined. The work’s reputation now rests on nostalgia for the past instead of Behrangi’s standing as a revolutionary martyr. The merit of his story as a literary or revolutionary text needs to be re-evaluated. Few modern Persian works received as much attention. The story won international awards in places like Bologna and Bratislava, and Behrangi’s suspicious drowning, attributed to the shah’s regime, burnished his status as a revolutionary hero. In 1971 the University of Tehran sponsored a festival in his honor, and by 1973 his writings were banned. Behrangi’s heyday immediately preceded the Iranian revolution. Before 1979, “The Little Black Fish” was one of only three modern Persian literary works published as a book in America (the others were Hedayat’s The Blind Owl and Al-e Ahmad’s The School Principal). In fact, it was published four times: as an adapted children’s story; in a collection of Behrangi’s stories by a leftist Iranian student association; as part of a special issue of The Literary Review; and in a collection of his stories by Three Continents Press. “The Little Black Fish” has been translated more than any other modern Iranian story, but it is now missing from English anthologies of modern Persian literature. While a number of earlier essays focus on his writing, no recent scholarly work has been done on Behrangi in English. And more recent translations often cast the story as a tool for teaching Persian or as a nostalgic children’s story. They stress the sentimental aspects, domesticating it for the American reader and forgetting the political message. In my paper, I review the different ways this text can be read: as a children tale, a coming-of-age story, a literary fable, or a political allegory. I consider how these interpretations have changed before and after the Iranian revolution, comparing different retranslations in order to show how they reflect Iranian history and the perspectives of the translators as well as the changing narratives of the Iranian-American diaspora and its complicated relationship with Iran.