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Three experiments are reported in which subjects were asked to remember simple stories they had read. The goal was to examine the power of the story schema, postulated in a contemporary story grammar, to influence subjects' level and organization of memory, particularly when they are presented with scrambled versions of stories. The results of Experiment 1 are consistent with previous findings, and we demonstrated the schema's influence on the level and organization of free recall. In Experiment 2 we demonstrated the strong influence of the schema on recall of details (measured by a cloze procedure), as well as recall for the story's gist (measured by a summary construction task). Finally, in Experiment 3 we demonstrated that the schema's influence on the organization of memory holds over time and serves to buttress the more abstract and general elements of the narrative.