Short Stories About Winter: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories set in winter, from To Build a Fire and The Snow Queen to Master and Man and The Dead, summarised and compared for readers and writers.
Winter is the season stories happen in because it closes doors. A blizzard, a frozen river, a coat that cannot be afforded: the cold gives a writer stakes without needing a villain, and the writers here used it to strip their characters to what they actually are.
The collection begins with the cold that kills, moves through the cold that tests, and ends with snow falling gently over a whole country. Each title links to a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
To Build a Fire by Jack London. A man walks a Yukon trail alone at seventy-five below with a dog that knows better, and gets his feet wet at the one place he was warned about. His fingers stop working before his mind does.
The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. A barefoot child on the last night of the year sits between two houses and lights her unsold matches for warmth, and each one shows her a stove, a table, a tree. The last shows her grandmother.
The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen. A splinter of a magic mirror lodges in Kay's eye and heart, and the Snow Queen carries him north to a palace of ice. Gerda walks after him barefoot, past a robber girl, a reindeer and a Finn woman, and finds him piecing together ice.
The White Silence by Jack London. Three people and a dog team cross a frozen country where the silence itself seems to weigh on them, and a tree falls where no tree has fallen in centuries. The Kid has to choose between staying and living.
Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy. A merchant sets out in a snowstorm to close a land deal, with his peasant Nikita driving, and they lose the road twice and return to the same village. The third time they stop in a ravine, and the merchant makes a decision in the dark.
Vanka by Anton Chekhov. On Christmas Eve a boy apprenticed to a Moscow shoemaker writes to his grandfather, remembering the frost in the village and the dogs Kashtanka and Eel. He posts the letter in the first box he finds.
The Dead by James Joyce. After a January party in Dublin, Gabriel Conroy stands at a hotel window while snow falls on the city and, he thinks, on every part of Ireland, including a graveyard in the west. His wife is asleep behind him.
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. The Petersburg frost bites through a clerk's threadbare coat, and the clerk starves himself through a winter to afford a new one. He wears it once.
The Outcasts of Poker Flat by Bret Harte. A gambler, two women and a drunk are run out of a mining town and camp on the pass with two young runaways, and it begins to snow. When the food runs low the party decides who eats.
Misery by Anton Chekhov. Snow falls on a Petersburg cabman and his horse as dusk comes on, and the cabman tries to tell each fare about the son he buried that week. It is snowing still when he goes to the stable.
Reading them together
Together the stories argue that winter is a moral instrument. London uses it to test competence, Tolstoy to test a merchant's soul, Harte to test a gambler's, and in all three the snow gives the same answer: it does not matter what you meant. Andersen and Chekhov use it differently, as a window between the warm and the cold, and put a child on the wrong side of the glass.
Set The Dead beside The Overcoat. In one the snow is a benediction over the living and the dead; in the other it is simply the reason a man needs a coat. Both writers were describing the same weather.
If you want to write about winter
What writers can take from this
- Read To Build a Fire and Master and Man in one sitting; they are the same night in two countries.
- The two Andersen tales are for reading aloud, one short and one long.
- The Dead is the end of Dubliners; read the last two pages twice.
- Vanka and Misery are Chekhov's two Petersburg winters; read them together for a boy and an old man in the same snow.
- The Outcasts of Poker Flat is a Western; do not let the setting make you skim the cards.
Try it yourself
Write a story that takes place during a single snowstorm, in which a character has to choose between reaching shelter and staying with someone who cannot.
Questions
What is the best short story about winter?
To Build a Fire is the most read, and Master and Man the most admired. The Dead is the one whose snow everyone remembers.
Which winter short stories are good for students?
To Build a Fire, The Little Match Girl, Vanka and The Outcasts of Poker Flat are short and clear and much taught. The Snow Queen suits younger readers in instalments.
Which classic winter story is the shortest?
The Little Match Girl, at about a thousand words. Vanka is around fifteen hundred.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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