“In Another Country” was originally published in the April 1927 issue of Scribner's Magazine. It was collected in Men Without Women (1927). It is currently most readily available in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (Scribner).

In my thirtieth summer, in 1966, I read many stories by John O'Hara, and read Hemingway's stories again, and his “In Another Country” challenged me more than I could know then. That summer was my last at the University of Iowa; I had a Master of Fine Arts Degree and, beginning in the fall, a job as a teacher, in Massachusetts. My wife and four children and I would move there in August. Until then, we lived in Iowa City and I taught two freshman rhetoric classes four mornings a week, then came home to eat lunch and write. I wrote in my den at the front of the house, a small room with large windows, and I looked out across the lawn at an intersection of streets shaded by tall trees. I was trying to learn to write stories, and was reading O'Hara and Hemingway as a carpenter might look at an excellent house someone else has built.

“In Another Country” became that summer one of my favorite stories written by anyone, and it still is. But I could not fully understand the story. What's it about? I said to a friend as we drove in his car to the university track to run laps. He said: It's about the futility of cures. That nestled beneath my heart, displaced my confusion. Yes. The futility of cures. Then everything connected and formed a whole, and in the car with my friend, then running with him around the track, I saw the story as you see a painting, and one of the central images was the black silk handkerchief covering the wound where the young man's nose had been.

Kurt Vonnegut was our neighbor. We had adjacent lawns; he lived behind us, at the top of the hill. One day that summer he was outside on his lawn or on his front porch four times when I was outside, and we waved and called to each other.