Cross-Country Snow

"Cross Country Snow" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's first American volume of short stories In Our Time in 1925. The story features Hemingway's recurrent autobiographical character Nick Adams and explores the regenerative powers of nature and the joy of skiing.

In 1922 Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley came to Paris where he worked as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. During that period he made friends with modernist writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, who influenced his early development as a fiction writer. The year 1923 saw his first published work, a slim volume titled Three Stories and Ten Poems, followed the next year by a collection of short vignettes, in our time (without capitals). Hoping to have in our time published in New York, in 1924 he began writing stories to add to the volume. On October 5, 1925, the expanded edition of In Our Time (with conventional capitalization in the title) was published by Boni & Liveright in New York.

In those years the Hemingways were avid skiers after their first trip to Switzerland in 1922. Hadley wrote "skiing became a must", adding, "It is the kind of thing that it seems one will never learn, and then all of a sudden you can do it". In the early 1920s they stayed in Montreaux and skied at Les Avants; by the mid- 1920s they spent most of the winter months in Austria, at Schruns. Hemingway wrote "Cross Country Snow" in 1924 after wintering for the first time in Cortina d'Ampezzo with Hadley and their infant son Jack.

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