One True Podcast

Welcome to the fourteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.This episode continues Hemingway’s exploration of bullfighting and violence through a study of Nicanor Villalta. In two short paragraphs, Hemingway masterfully captures the movement of matador and bull, leading up to the pivotal image where "Villalta became one with the bull." We discuss how Hemingway depicts good vs. bad bullfighters; we consider ...

Welcome to the thirteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.This episode continues Hemingway’s exploration of bullfighting and violence. This chapter is the second of the five consecutive bullfighting sketches Hemingway placed towards the end of in our time. A raucous crowd objects to a bad bullfight, leading to the humiliating cutting of a matador’s pigtails. We discuss the narrator’s relationship to the incompe...

Stewart O’Nan, the prolific author of West of Sunset and other works of fiction and non-fiction, shares his one true sentence from “The End of Something.”

One True Podcast takes on another classic Hemingway short story as Olivia Carr Edenfield joins us to discuss “Cross-Country Snow,” the beloved Nick Adams story from In Our Time. Prof. Edenfield discusses how this skiing trip links Nick’s past with his future, how it fits as a crucial pivot in the story cycle, the Nick-George relationship, the mysterious waitress, the wonderful description of skiing, how the story reflects Hemingway’s biography of the mid-1920s … and that curious title.Th...

Welcome to the twelfth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.In this episode, we discuss Hemingway's powerful depiction of a bullfighting scene between bull and horse. We start out with that famous "whack whacked" opening before turning to what might be an equally important and seriously overlooked (by us!) part of the story. In addition, we read this vignette in light of Hemingway's remarks about gored horses from T...

Welcome to the eleventh of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.Listeners might be familiar with this vignette as the short story "The Revolutionist" from Hemingway's bigger collection In Our Time published in 1925. How does the vignette characterize the post-WWI communist revolution and its revolutionaries as well as counter-responses in Hungary, Italy, and Switzerland? Why does the narrator seem to fixate on cl...

Javier Fuentes, the 2024 PEN/Hemingway winner for Countries of Origin, shares his one true sentence from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."

Live from Bilbao! One True Podcast presents our show live from the 20th International Hemingway Conference in Bilbao, Spain. We welcome scholars Stacey Guill and Alberto Lena to explore Hemingway’s five stories of the Spanish Civil War. These obscure, under-discussed stories – including “The Denunciation,” “The Butterfly and the Tank,” and “Landscape With Figures” – become coherent and significant as our guests explore their roots in Spanish culture and history as well as Hemingway’s own life...

One True Podcast welcomes the great Larry Grimes to discuss “Today Is Friday,” the curious playlet from Men Without Women about three Roman soldiers and a Jewish barman discussing Jesus’s crucifixion.This interview explores the resonance of the story and what it tells us about Hemingway’s lifelong quest for the religious experience. We discuss Hemingway’s fascination with executions, masculine Christianity, and hybrid religions. We also explore how the 3rd Roman Soldier unexpectedly emerges a...

Welcome to the tenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.This chapter will be familiar to many readers as the bitter narrative that would later be presented as “A Very Short Story.” Here, this vignette is the longest in this volume. Is it also the most autobiographical? We discuss the ill-fated World War I love affair between our hero and Ag (later Luz), doomed due to an insurmountable age gap, our hero’s bad attit...

Welcome to the ninth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.This chapter is the first of the vignettes set in America, a fictionalized account of a cigar store robbery that Hemingway learned about in Kansas City in 1917. We discuss this sketch’s depiction of national confusion, moral ambiguity, attitudes towards immigrants, and how Hemingway’s specific language renders a complex scene. Through our conversation, the su...

One True Podcast celebrates the publication of Volume 6 of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway by welcoming two of its editors, Sandra Spanier and Verna Kale. These letters, spanning 1934-1936, find Hemingway in Key West, fishing, publishing Green Hills of Africa, producing his Esquire dispatches, making his famous reaction to the Florida hurricane of 1935, and negotiating the competing demands of life, art, business, and celebrity.We discuss Hemingway’s relationships with his correspondent...

We continue our exploration of Hemingway's short stories with his masterful narrative, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." To aid us in this effort, we're joined by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, who is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico and served as the 2022 Obama Fellow at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies. Herlihy-Mera is the author of, among other works, Decolonizing American Spanish.In this conversation, we examine key dynamics between the major characters in this very ...

Welcome to the eighth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.On the heels of the vignette about Nick's war injury, this bombardment scene evokes the idea that there are no atheists in foxholes while, at the same time, capturing the transactional nature of religion during wartime. We discuss various ways this vignette treats the topic of religion, try to gain a sense of the narrator's identity, and draw connectio...

Welcome to the seventh of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.In this important vignette, Hemingway depicts Nick's war injury and his "separate peace" with Rinaldi. We discuss Hemingway's own wounding during WWI, key differences between the final version of the vignette and early drafts, and Young's influential ideas about the "wound theory." We also take on various questions: Is Rinaldi dead by the end of the v...

The Spanish Civil War was a brutal and maddeningly complex historical event, with enormous repercussions on Ernest Hemingway’s life and career. To guide us through the many moving parts and frayed relationships, we welcome back Amanda Vaill to One True Podcast. Vaill’s essential book, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, guides us through the events of the war, including the private adventures of Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, John Dos Passos, Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, ...

Julie Schumacher, author of The Dear Committee Trilogy (Dear Committee Members, The Shakespeare Requirement , and The English Experience), shares her one true sentence from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. As Schumacher explores, Hemingway's short, terse writing often leads to some "long, meandering, winding roads of sentences" like the one she's chosen for this episode. In addition, she raises intriguing questions about how Hemingway drafted the sentence, examines what makes certain character...

Welcome to the sixth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.The scene depicts the execution of six Greek officials toward the end of 1922. In this episode, we discuss the history of that trial and execution, the journalistic coverage of events, and Hemingway's fictional treatment of the execution. We also relate this vignette to other works, such as A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and even Tintorett...

Welcome to the fifth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.This scene of a barricade and a retreat continues Hemingway's brilliant depictions of Battle of Mons. In this episode, we explore some historical aspects of that retreat, compare the narrative voice and point of view to chapter four, and much more. As always, we examine how these first five vignettes are cohering into a larger project. Join us as we explore i...

The two great titans of twentieth-century American literature – Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner – never met. They corresponded only a time or two; however, they were always on each other’s minds. Their hyper-awareness of the other’s recent work led sometimes to envy, sometimes to awe, and frequently to catty comments.To help us learn more about these two men and their fraught relationship, we invite Prof. Ahmed Honeini of Royal Holloway, University of London, to the program. Honeini is ...

This episode will focus on the Spanish Civil War and how one particular incident – the murder of accused Fascist spy José Robles – ruptured the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.To sort out the many moving parts to this chapter of Hemingway’s life, we welcome Stephen Koch, the author of The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles. Koch takes us through the complicated relationship between Hemingway and Dos Passos, what ended it, and how it ...

Welcome to the fourth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.At 75 words, this short scene describes the Battle of Mons. To Ezra Pound, Hemingway would refer to this conflict (from August 1914 at the very beginning of the First World War) as "clear and noble." In this episode, we discuss the historical aspects of the battle, Hemingway's friendship with the British soldier Eric Edward “Chink” Dorman-Smith, and the mixt...

Welcome to the third of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.In this scene, Hemingway describes the minarets rising over the landscape overlooking the harrowing evacuation at the Greco-Turkish War in 1922. Hemingway distills the vast scope of inhumanity into the expression of one scared child. We discuss how this scene intersects with his biographical experiences, his journalism, and how the first three vignettes are b...

American modernism is a concept that is so slippery that even scholars don’t always agree on its definition. Is it a historical era, or a literary technique? Was Ernest Hemingway even a modernist? If so, which of his works are most modernistic?For this discussion, we turn to Mark Whalan, editor of the compendious new volume, Cambridge History of American Modernism, and Karen Leick, one of its contributors, who places Hemingway in a conversation with other American modernists including Stein, ...

Mark Kurlansky, the author of dozens of books of fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature (including Cod, Salt, and The Importance of Not Being Ernest), shares his one true sentence from Hemingway's story "In Another Country."

Welcome to the second of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.In this scene, Hemingway puts us into a chaotic bullfighting scene, with gorings, hooting crowds, and a kid who tries to save the day. We discuss how this early sketch prefigures Hemingway’s career-long fascination with the bullfight and the problem of depicting it. Just two chapters into this year-long read of in our time, patterns are beginning to emerge. ...

One True Podcast reads in our time! Welcome to the first of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of Hemingway’s book of vignettes.Starting with the unforgettable opening salvo -- “Everybody was drunk” -- chapter one describes a kitchen corporal in a chaotic battery on the way to the Champagne during World War I. We explore these 112 words and what they reveal about Hemingway’s experimentation, his challenging style, and his attitude about war as a young man. As Hemingway writes,...

What was Ernest Hemingway doing in 1924? Where was he? What were his important relationships? What were his challenges? What was he writing? The excellent Verna Kale -- Hemingway biographer and Associate Editor of the Hemingway Letters Project -- joins us to trace Hemingway’s experiences one hundred years ago, walking us through his biography, his letters, his finances, and even some of his poetry. According to Kale, Hemingway wasn’t quite Hemingway yet, but he was right on the cus...

‘Tis the season! And it wouldn’t be the holiday season without welcoming Suzanne del Gizzo to discuss a seasonally appropriate Hemingway work. In this episode, we examine “A North of Italy of Christmas,” a raucous article he wrote for the Toronto Daily Star one hundred years ago.Del Gizzo – the celebrated editor of The Hemingway Review -- discusses the absurd humor in the piece, all the mistletoe, old favorite Chink Dorman-Smith, and Hemingway’s early writing style. She unpacks the curious ti...

Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, author of the short story collection The Smallest of Entryways and Ernest's Way: An International Journey Through Hemingway's Life, shares her one true sentence from her great-grandfather's story "Big Two-Hearted River."

The longest and most mutually beneficial relationship of Ernest Hemingway’s life was with the Charles Scribner's Sons publishing house, a partnership that continues to the present day. Charles Scribner III joins the show to discuss his family’s legacy in publishing, the storied history of Scribner, and Hemingway’s history with the company.We discuss Scribner III’s new book, Scribners: Five Generations in Publishing, which describes the history of the publishing house, including its relationsh...

Tim O'Brien, the author of The Things They Carried, Dad's Maybe Book, and America Fantastica, shares his one true sentence from The Sun Also Rises. Toward the end of the episode, we also reflect on Tim's riveting speech at Dominican University during the 2016 Hemingway Society conference in Oak Park, Illinois.

Join us for a special episode devoted to Lieutenant Rinaldo Rinaldi from A Farewell to Arms!On this episode, scholar Michael Kim Roos (co-author of the essential Reading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms) explores the many dimensions of this beloved character. We discuss Rinaldi’s role as Frederic Henry’s best friend, his development over the course of the novel, Hemingway’s historical inspiration for this character, and the way Rinaldi, a man of science and sensualism, represents one of the nov...

Have you ever read “The Porter”? In this episode, we take you to a seldom-visited corner of Hemingway’s short story catalogue to discuss this fascinating outtake from his discarded novel about a father-son train trip across the United States into Canada.For guidance over this unfamiliar terrain, we turn to the great Ian Marshall, who explains the racial, class, and historical elements of this tale. We discuss how Hemingway captures the American landscape, the father-son relationship, where th...

Hemingway coined the phrase “grace under pressure” in a 1926 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Since then, the phrase has been repeated like a mantra to describe Hemingway’s attitude toward life and death, his definition of courage, and is regularly used as a lens through which to view his fiction. On this episode, scholar David Wyatt joins us to discuss the significance and legacy of “grace under pressure.” Over the course of the interview, we apply the model of “grace under pressure” to variou...

Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River and Small Mercies, shares his one true sentence from A Moveable Feast.

In this episode, One True Podcast takes on the white whale of Hemingway studies: the unpublished manuscript of The Garden of Eden. Although the published version we know may be shocking, the sprawling manuscript reveals even more dimensions of this challenging text and the many complexities of its author.For this discussion, we turn to Hemingway Society President Carl Eby, who shares what he’s learned about the manuscript through more than thirty years of studying it and many, many hours in t...

Oscar Hokeah, winner of the 2023 PEN/Hemingway Award for Calling for a Blanket Dance, shares his one true sentence from The Old Man and the Sea.

We take a look at Hemingway’s intersection with Italian Fascism by examining two of its most volatile figures, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ezra Pound.In this episode, we talk to Lucy Hughes-Hallett, D’Annunzio’s award-winning biographer, who discusses this notorious firebrand’s military career, love affairs, and artistic legacy. Hughes-Hallett also suggests D’Annunzio’s unspoken role in Hemingway’s most famous passage from A Farewell to Arms.Next, Lauren Arrington, author of The Poets of Rapallo,...

For our 100th episode, One True Podcast investigates the legend of the lost manuscripts! In December 1922, Hemingway’s first wife Hadley, misplaced a suitcase filled with the young Hemingway’s unpublished writing. Since then, this episode has invited intense speculation: Was this early work stolen? Did it end up in the garbage? Did Hadley subconsciously want the work to be stolen? In order to explore the unknowable, we turn to four novelists who each use this mysterious episode as the in...

Robert Pinsky, U.S. Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000 and author of The Figured Wheel and Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet (among other highly acclaimed works), shares his one true sentence from Hemingway's Paris Review interview.

The legendary feminist critic Judith Fetterley joins us to discuss her brilliant and incendiary work on A Farewell to Arms, a piece from 1978 that has endured as one of the definitive feminist critiques of Hemingway. Prof. Fetterley discusses protagonist Frederic Henry’s self-pity and self-absorption, Catherine’s obsequiousness, and Hemingway’s design of the novel that leads Fetterley to conclude that Catherine “dies because she is a woman.” We go on to discuss Hemingway’s style, t...

We head into the heart of the sea with award-winning historian Nathaniel Philbrick to discuss Hemingway, Melville, and where these American writers share a vision and where they part. Philbrick discusses The Old Man and the Sea and Moby-Dick as American classics that overlap and speak to each other across the years. He also covers the short story "After the Storm" as an essential narrative of Hemingway's vision of the sea. Throughout, Philbrick examines how Hemingway ...

Kerri Maher, author of The Paris Bookseller, shares her one true sentence from Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

Actor Mackenzie Astin joins us to discuss the 1996 movie In Love and War, the narrative of Hemingway’s wounding in World War I and subsequent romance with nurse Agnes Von Kurowsky. Directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Chris O’Donnell, Sandra Bullock, Emilio Bonucci, as well as Astin, this war epic depicts the upheaval that World War I created in the life of the teenaged Hemingway and others. Astin discusses Attenborough’s benevolent presence on the set, the performance of t...

Ernest Hemingway’s Red Cross experience in Italy during World War I was short, but it changed the course of his life and his writing. From being wounding in July 1918 to the abrupt end to his relationship with nurse Agnes Von Kurowsky, Hemingway would revisit those traumas for the rest of his life and write about them for his entire career.This pair of tumultuous experiences led to a fascinating book – Hemingway in Love and War – co-written by Hemingway’s hospital roommate Henry Serrano Villa...

One True Podcast continues our exploration of the always complicated world of Hemingway’s volatile “friendships” with an episode devoted to Gertrude Stein. We turn to scholar Barbara Will who discusses the things Miss Stein instructed Hemingway about, both personally and professionally. We cover Stein’s background and education, her depiction in A Moveable Feast, her role in Modernism, her politics during World War I and World War II, the way things ended between her and Hemingway, and some o...

Jay McInerney, (bestselling author of Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, How It Ended, and most recently Bright, Precious Days) shares his one true sentence from Hemingway's story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

John Hemingway - grandson of Ernest and son of Gregory -- shares his remarkable story with us. We explore John's important book, Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir, his revealing and unsparing account of his life as a Hemingway.We cover Ernest's volatile relationship with John's father, a history that includes affection and intimate understanding, but also correspondence filled with recriminations. Our discussion of the Ernest-Gregory relationship leads to an illuminating examination of fathers a...

Is “Hills Like White Elephants” Hemingway’s greatest short story ever, or only his most famous? Bolstering the case for “Hills Like White Elephants” as the G.O.A.T., esteemed scholar Russ Pottle joins us to explain the story’s composition, imagery, historical and biographical contexts, and unforgettable dialogue.Pottle helps us read between the lines in the ways Hemingway characterizes Jig and the American through their dialogue and their silence, and through their actions. We figure ou...

Ilan Stavans, publisher of Restless Books and author of numerous works including Quixote and What is American Literature?, shares his one true sentence from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

For an episode devoted to Hadley Richardson, we are proud to welcome Gioia Diliberto, esteemed writer and author of many books, including Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife. We explore Hadley’s difficult childhood, her time in Paris with Hemingway, the dissolution of their marriage, the loss of Hemingway’s manuscripts, the famous “100-day separation” pact, and the rest of their legendary relationship. Diliberto discusses the revelations of the Sokoloff tapes, Hadley’s...

The great Italian scholar Martina Mastandrea discusses “In Another Country,” one of Hemingway’s finest short stories. After Mastandrea treats us to an Italian rendition of the famous opening paragraph, we explore the many treasures of the story: Why did F. Scott Fitzgerald admire the first sentence of the story so much? Is this a Nick Adams story? What does it tell us about Hemingway's perspective on war? What's the difference between our protagonist and the hunting hawks? Why is the maj...

Naomi Wood, author of Mrs. Hemingway, shares her one true sentence from a letter Hemingway wrote to friends Gerald and Sara Murphy after the death of their son, Baoth, in 1935.

Happy New Year from One True Podcast! We usher in 2023 with our new year's tradition of wondering what Ernest Hemingway was doing one hundred years ago. In 1923, what was Hemingway writing? Where did he live? Who were his friends and enemies? How was his marriage going? And what was on the horizon? To answer these questions, we turn to his biographer, James M. Hutchisson, emeritus professor at The Citadel and author of Ernest Hemingway: A New Life. Hutchisson describes Hemingway’s...

We welcome back Suzanne del Gizzo to ring in the season with a discussion of “The Christmas Gift,” Hemingway’s account of his 1954 plane crashes in East Africa. Del Gizzo, editor of The Hemingway Review and widely published scholar, guides us through this extraordinary piece originally written for Look magazine, its role in Hemingway’s self-mythologizing, its examination of his near-death experience, its representation of Mary, and how the article both reveals and obscures what actually happe...

Michael Mewshaw, author of numerous novels and nonfiction works (including Year of the Gun, The Lost Prince, and the forthcoming My Man in Antibes: Getting to Know Graham Greene) shares his one true sentence from Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

We are joined by legendary scholar Jackson Bryer, who explains the origins and implications of a notorious concept: the Hemingway code. When the code was introduced in the 1950s by influential scholar Philip Young, what did he intend it to mean? What is a "code hero"? What is a "Hemingway hero"? What did Hemingway mean by “grace under pressure”? Bryer helps us explore the impact and legacy of the code, its relevance today and its limitations, ultimately suggesting how it might enrich our...

We welcome prolific scholar Don Daiker to help us celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Nick Adams Stories. We discuss the volume’s impact and legacy, Philip Young’s controversial editorial decisions, the sequencing, and the characterization of Nick himself, in all of his various phases. Which stories does Daiker consider underrated? Is Dr. Adams unjustly criticized as cold and unloving? What is the role of “The Last Good Country,” the longest story in the volume? Is “B...

Joshua Ferris, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for his novel Then We Came to the End, joins us to discuss his one true sentence from The Sun Also Rises.

One hundred years ago, in September 1922, Turkish forces torched the port city of Smyrna in a hellish episode towards the end of the Greco-Turkish War. The ensuing evacuation, with its chaos and grisly violence, inspired Hemingway’s journalism as well as his short fiction. Hemingway’s most enduring effort to capture this atrocity is "On the Quai at Smyrna," which would become the first story in his collection In Our Time. This masterpiece of irony with its memorable narrative voice has intrig...

We are asking the entire One True Podcast community to contribute to the Hurricane Ian relief effort. Our production studios are in Fort Myers, Florida, which took the brunt of the storm, so we want to do anything we can to lend a hand. This episode honors the recovery effort by urging our listeners to go to www.communitycooperative.com and give generously to provide direct help to those who suffered from the hurricane. Fittingly, we will devote this One True Fundraiser to a lively discussion...

Kawai Strong Washburn, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for his novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors, joins us to discuss his one true sentence from "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

Timothy Christian, author of Hemingway's Widow: The Life and Legacy of Mary Welsh Hemingway, joins us for a conversation about Hemingway's fourth and final wife. Our wide-ranging interview covers Mary's life before, during, and after Hemingway. We explore Mary's family, her early life and education, including her impressive career as a journalist. We cover her first encounter with Hemingway in London during World War II, the development of their sometimes-volatile relationship, and her c...

One True Podcast examines the deadly category 5 hurricane that ravaged the Florida Keys over Labor Day weekend in 1935, both from a historical perspective and a fictional treatment. We first hear from historian Thomas Neil Knowles, author of Category 5: The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane, who describes the deadly weather system, its devastating toll on the veterans stationed along the Keys, the bureaucratic inefficiencies, and its legacy. Next, we are joined by Erika Robuck, award-winning author of...

Billy Collins, the author of numerous collections of poetry and the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 , shares his one true sentence from "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

In this live interview from the 19th Biennial Hemingway Society Conference in Sheridan, Wyoming, we talk with John Sutton and Chris Warren about Hemingway's summers spent in Wyoming and Montana and how his experiences in the American West left their mark on his stories and novels.John Sutton is the director of the NEH “Creating Humanities Communities along Wyoming's Hemingway Highway” Grant project. Chris Warren is the author of Ernest Hemingway in the Yellowstone High Country.During this int...

Craig Johnson, author of the widely celebrated Longmire series, shares his one true sentence from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."

In the lead-up to the Hemingway Society conference in Wyoming and Montana, we welcome Darla Worden to explore some fascinating connections between Hemingway and the American West.Worden is the author of the book Cockeyed Happy: Ernest Hemingway's Wyoming Summers with Pauline. She's also the founder and director of the Left Bank Writers Retreat in Paris and the Wyoming Writers Retreat. Although we may not associate Hemingway with the American West, Worden describes the importance of Hemingway'...

Jennifer Haigh, author of Mrs. Kimble and Mercy Street, joins us to talk about her one true sentence from the short story "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot."

In 1986, twenty-five years after Hemingway’s death, Scribner’s published a coherent portion of his sprawling manuscript called The Garden of Eden. This publication changed the way we view Hemingway’s engagement with gender and sexuality, and remains his most daring novel ever. In order to make that novel publishable, Scribner’s called on a gentleman named Tom Jenks to do the editing. Jenks hauled the manuscript home on the New York City subway in shopping bags and began his work, which ...

Today’s episode investigates two largely forgotten figures from Hemingway’s past: Lewis Galantière and Guy Hickok. Galantière was a critic who befriended Hemingway in the early Paris years, and they maintained a friendship and correspondence for many years. Hickok was Hemingway’s journalist buddy who accompanied him through Italy for the notorious March 1927 trip that spawned “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” To discuss these men and their respective relationships to Hemingway, we welcome their ...

David Frum, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of numerous books including Trumpocracy and Trumpocalypse, and speechwriter for President George W. Bush, joins us to talk about his one true sentence from A Farewell to Arms.

Andrew Feldman joins us to talk about his book Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba. What did Cuba mean to Papa and what has Papa meant to Cuba? To explore the place where Hemingway spent much of his adult life and Ernest became Ernesto, we discuss Hemingway's relationship to the Cuban people, his engagement with Cuban politics, and some of his greatest works, including The Old Man and the Sea and A Moveable Feast. Feldman gives One True Podcast a debrief on...

Hemingway’s first book of short stories, In Our Time, is the most experimental work of his career and his most challenging. It is also an early masterpiece, with brutal, opaque stories like “Indian Camp,” “The Battler,” and "Soldier's Home." For this episode, we are joined by J. Gerald Kennedy, editor of the new Norton Critical Edition of In Our Time, to discuss the emergence of the Hemingway style, the book as a narrative sequence, its composition, its legacy, and even the discarded fragment...

Michael Katakis, photographer and author of A Thousand Shards of Glass, Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life, and Dangerous Men, joins us to talk about his one true sentence from the short story "Indian Camp."

The pride of Arkansas, Ruth A. Hawkins, joins the show for an illuminating episode on Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.Hawkins draws from her definitive book Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow to discuss Pfeiffer’s family and upbringing, her controversial friendship with Hadley, her marriage to Ernest, her motherhood, the mysterious details of her death, and her legacy. Although the Hemingway-Pfeiffer marriage is often ignored or even maligned, new dimensions to their relat...

Join us for a conversation about one of Hemingway's most beloved secondary characters: the hard-drinking, fun-loving, quick-witted writer, fly fisher, and amateur taxidermist, Bill Gorton from The Sun Also Rises.Michael Thurston, editor of the new Norton Critical Edition of The Sun Also Rises, guides us through Bill's friendship with Jake, explores the historical people who inspired his creation, analyzes Bill's role in the novel, and also pins down some of his more arcane allusions.This epis...

Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet and My Life as a Foreign Country, joins us to talk about his one true sentence from The Old Man and the Sea.

Meet us at rue Delambre for a memorable chat with Sarah Churchwell about the way Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast has shaped the way we think about the Hemingway-Fitzgerald relationship. What are the repercussions of Hemingway getting the last word on the Fitzgerald legacy? How much of what Hemingway wrote is even true? What were Hemingway’s strategies as he described himself, Fitzgerald, Zelda, and even Bumby in the alcohol-soaked distant memories of 1920s Paris? And is the butterfly epig...

We are joined by Ryan Hediger to get to the bottom of Hemingway's genre-bending and gruesomely descriptive "A Natural History of the Dead."First published in Hemingway's bullfighting treatise Death in the Afternoon in 1932 and then reprinted a year later in Winner Take Nothing, this work gives us a chance to consider Hemingway's treatment of death in his work, as well as the artist's obligation to depict violence with a scientific objectivity. Hediger discusses the way "A Natural History...

Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, Deep Creek, and Contents May Have Shifted, joins us to talk about her one true Hemingway sentence.

We usher in 2022 by exploring what Hemingway was doing one hundred years ago. Mary V. Dearborn, the author of Ernest Hemingway: A Biography, joins the show to discuss Hemingway’s writing from 1922, his formative experiences as a journalist, and the notorious lost manuscripts last seen in Paris’s Gare de Lyon. For literary modernism, 1922 is an annus mirabilis, and we celebrate Hemingway’s own 1922, as he makes his first steps onto the global stage. Happy New Year, everybody, and happy li...

Ring in the season with One True Podcast! Hemingway Review editor Suzanne del Gizzo joins us on our holiday show for the second year in a row. For this episode, we discuss Hemingway’s charming 1923 article for the Toronto Daily Star, “Christmas on the Roof of the World,” his chronicle of a skiing idyll in the Swiss Alps with his wife Hadley and “Chink” Dorman-Smith.We discuss the article’s fascinating prose style, its uncharacteristic tone, and the placement of this obscure piece in Hemingway...

Sherman Alexie, the award-winning writer, poet, and filmmaker whose works include The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Reservation Blues, joins us to talk about his one true Hemingway sentence from "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."

Stop by Henry’s lunch-room as we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the adaptation of The Killers with legendary film historian James Naremore. We discuss the legacy of the film, the difficulty of adapting Hemingway’s writing, what makes this movie a noir classic, the performances of megastars Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, and so much more.Hemingway once said that he enjoyed watching the movie “when I want to see Miss Gardner and hear the shooting.” He also called it “the only good pict...

Debra Moddelmog shares her one true sentence from Hemingway's short story "The Sea Change."

Join us as we welcome Janet Somerville, author of Yours, for Probably Always, for a fascinating discussion about Martha Gellhorn. Gellhorn is most often remembered and depicted as Ernest Hemingway's third wife, but she was also a novelist, war correspondent, activist, and iconoclast. Somerville guides us through the life of this trailblazer: her childhood in St. Louis, a close relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, that notorious first encounter with Hemingway in a Key West bar, her tumultuous ...

In this episode, we celebrate the Fall Classic with a show devoted to Hemingway and baseball. First, we welcome scholar Sharon Hamilton to discuss the 1919 Black Sox scandal, how it affected Hemingway, and the legacy that World Series and the trial had on society and sports.We then have a conversation with David Martens and Joshua Robinson, who recall their experiences investigating Gigi’s All-Stars, the baseball team of Cuban youngsters that Hemingway formed to occupy his youngest son, Grego...

Russell Banks, author of Cloudsplitter and Foregone, shares his one true sentence from Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

Jump on Interstate 70 with us as we take a trip between two great American cities planted on the outer edges of Missouri -- St. Louis and Kansas City -- in order to explore their connections to Hemingway. In the first half of our discussion, we're joined by Andrew Theising, author of Hemingway's Saint Louis: How St. Louisans Shaped His Life and Legacy, to understand more about the city's history, its arts & culture, and a vast array of St. Louisans, including Hemingway's first three wives...

In this episode, we welcome Nicholas Reynolds, author of Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961, to discuss Hemingway's politics and involvement in espionage and intelligence. Why was the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 Hemingway's political genesis point? How and why was he recruited by the Soviet NKVD? What was his involvement, beyond the role of war correspondent, during WWII? Reynolds, a former Marine colonel and intelligence officer who has served ...

Erik Nakjavani shares his one true sentence from Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa.

For this fascinating discussion, we welcome the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian A. Scott Berg, author of Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, to discuss Perkins’s role in Hemingway’s life and career.Berg talks about the research and writing of his biography, the difference between Perkins’s approach to editing and promoting Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and the editor's collaborations with other writers such as Thomas Wolfe, James Jones, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Berg also offers his “one true sen...

We welcome Valerie Hemingway to share her memories of her father-in-law and the thrilling Spanish summer of 1959. We draw from her wonderful memoir Running with the Bulls to hear stories about Hemingway’s later years, his writing process, and the stark difference between the dangerous summer of 1959 and the grim crises of 1960. Ms. Hemingway recollects her own Irish childhood and her development as a young journalist thrust into the exhilarating role as Hemingway’s secretary. She also lo...

Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog, Townie, and Gone So Long, talks about his one true Hemingway sentence from "Hills Like White Elephants."

One True Podcast takes a deep dive into Joan Miró’s masterpiece and Hemingway’s beloved possession, The Farm. We welcome art historian Alex Fernandez de Castro and journalist Hugh Eakin to discuss the meaning, history, and legacy of this powerful and infinitely mysterious painting. In our two-part interview, we cover Miró’s evolution as an artist, his similarities and differences with Hemingway, and the crucial importance of this painting in his storied career. We also learn the mytholo...

Amanda Vaill takes us to the French Riviera of the 1920s, drawing from her definitive book, Everybody Was So Young, to describe who Gerald and Sara Murphy were and what they meant to the artists they knew. Vaill discusses Fitzgerald’s poor behavior, Hemingway’s ambivalence to the rich, and Gerald’s own artistic efforts. Along the way, she suggests what gave the Murphys the enchanting quality that drew so many important figures into their circle. This episode was recorded on May 17, ...

Hideo Yanagisawa shares his choice for Hemingway's one true sentence, which comes from a letter to Charles Scribner about The Old Man and the Sea.