Explore every episode of the podcast One True Podcast

Michael Deagler, the 2025 PEN/Hemingway winner for Early Sobrieties, shares his one true sentence from To Have and Have Not.

Join us for our favorite Hemingway parlor game as this excellent novelist chooses his favorite sentence from everything Hemingway ever wrote. We discuss writing about addiction and recovery, Hemingway’s use of dialogue, the way The Sun Also Rises serves as a textbook guide for writing novels, and much more.

Don’t forget to submit your nomination for One True Book Club 2026! Submit your choice for a book that is not by Hemingway but is Hemingway-relevant to 1truepod@gmail.com.

Thank you for your continued support of One True Podcast!

One True Podcast looks ahead to the last volume of Hemingway’s letters! 

Although Hemingway’s correspondence from 1957-1961 won’t be officially published for another couple of decades, the co-editors of the last volume of the Hemingway letters – J. Gerald Kennedy and Michael Von Cannon – along with their advisory editor, Valerie Hemingway, share insights about their work that covers Hemingway’s final days.

We learn what was occupying Hemingway’s mind, his most frequent correspondents, the writing that consumed him, and how this last volume might reveal some of the health and psychological issues that plagued his later years. 

Join these three co-editors for an exclusive conversation on the volume we will eventually read, and their candid impressions of Hemingway’s last letters.

One True Podcast examines the most important male friendship of the last fifteen years of Hemingway’s life, his extraordinary relationship with Major General “Buck” Lanham, whom he met when he was an embedded journalist with the 22nd Infantry Regiment during World War II. 

Greer Rising – Buck was his father’s godfather – and Eileen Martin join us to talk about Buck’s background, his military history, his literary aspirations, and of course his intimate relationship with Hemingway. They discuss the Hemingway-Lanham interactions, encounters, and correspondence to demonstrate the intensity of the relationship and just how consequential it was.

Join us as we learn more about the inspiration behind Colonel Cantwell in Across the River and into the Trees, the man whom Hemingway called “the finest and bravest and most intelligent and able regimental commander I have ever known.”

Thank you for supporting One True Podcast! 

One True Podcast explores one of the most influential friends in Hemingway’s life: Eric “Chink” Dorman-Smith. Although Chink has been mentioned several times during past episodes, we finally devote an entire episode to this fascinating figure and his profound influence on Hemingway. 

For this discussion, we welcome Lavinia Greacen, the author of Chink: A Biography and, most recently, Military Maverick: Selected Letters and War Writing of “Chink” Dorman-Smith. We discuss Chink’s Irish background, his formidable military career, how he became Ernest and Hadley’s vacation companion, how his voice appears in Hemingway’s early war sketches, how he inspired the late novel Across the River and into the Trees, and much more. 

As a special gift to our listeners, we end the episode with some rare archival audio of Chink Dorman-Smith himself. We bet you will never read Chapter III of In Our Time the same way ever again.

At One True Podcast we were sad to hear of the death of Patrick Hemingway, the middle son of Ernest, who died on September 2, 2025. Patrick Hemingway (1928-2025) lived a life that was truly Hemingwayesque: traveling like his father, living much of his life in Africa, hunting and fishing, and determined to maintain the legacy of his father’s literary work. 

We invited Sandra Spanier, General Editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, to share her memories of Patrick, including his contributions to the Letters Project, her visits with him, and a poignant interview with Patrick that was conducted just a few months ago. Our episode closes with a soundbite from that June 2025 interview.

We hope you enjoy this immediate reaction to the sad news of Patrick’s passing.

One True Podcast continues our celebration of the centenary of Hemingway’s In Our Time by examining a classic Nick Adams story: "The End of Something."

We welcome Lisa Tyler to discuss the story, its setting, cast of characters, and curiously inexact title. We examine how the story serves as a prequel to "The Three-Day Blow," (while also pointing out many differences between the two texts), discuss the emotional and psychological damage suggested by Nick's line "everything was gone to hell inside of me," and figure out Bill's role in this break-up tale. 

Lisa Tyler, esteemed Hemingway scholar and editor of Wharton Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism, makes the convincing claim that Marjorie emerges from this story as one of the most remarkable female characters in Hemingway’s entire canon.

Join us for this discussion of a Hemingway classic! 

One True Podcast concludes its One True Book Club for the year with its third of three installments on W.H. Hudson’s 1885 novel, The Purple Land.

This final episode covers chapter 21 to the end. We examine how Hudson resolves the domestic plot, the travel plot, and the confrontation with the diabolical Don Hilario. We debate whether The Purple Land’s climax is or is not even climactic.

Then, we call in scholar Ilan Stavans, former OTP guest and editor of the U of Wisconsin Press edition of The Purple Land. Stavans ties up some of our loose ends and provides a broader historical and aesthetic context for Hudson’s project.

We hope you’ll enjoy this third episode on this fascinating and problematic novel. If you have a nomination for our 2026 One True Book Club selection (it must be Hemingway-relevant, but not by Hemingway), please email us at 1truepod@gmail.com.

Thank you as always for your support of One True Podcast!

Join us for a wide-ranging discussion about Hemingway’s cats! 

Ernest Hemingway was one of the most famous cat lovers in all of American literature, so we celebrate his passion for cats with three conversations that provide us three different perspectives.

First, we talk to Alexa Morgan, director of public relations at the Hemingway Home in Key West. She is intimately familiar with the day-to-day operations of the present-day Hemingway cats, herding all fifty-seven of them on a daily basis.

Next, evolutionary theorist Axel Lange describes the science behind polydactyly, that extra toe Hemingway cats are known for. Axel discusses how polydactyly relates to Darwin’s work, how the extra toe affects the cat’s behavior, and what it tells us about genetics.

Finally, we visit with author and illustrator Edward Hemingway, grandson of Ernest and son of Gregory and Valerie. Eddie has used cats in his work before, and is currently at work incorporating Hemingway’s first six-toed cat into a new work.

This episode is dedicated to Edie Von Cannon, Michael’s boisterous and attention-hungry cat, who has mewed her way through many of our interviews. 

Thanks for listening, and go give all your cats a belly rub in honor of this new One True Podcast episode! 

About seventy-five years ago, scholar Philip Young’s “wound theory” revolutionized Hemingway studies with a thesis that argued that Hemingway’s entire body of work was a series of responses to the injury he suffered in 1918 during World War One.

Young’s audacious theory invited a slew of biographical and psychological readings of Hemingway’s work. Scholars incorporated trauma theory, ecology, history, and gender. Young inspired generations of scholars and also generated harsh responses, including Hemingway’s own vitriolic reaction.

Debra Moddelmog, the great Hemingway scholar who studied with Young at Penn State, unpacks the wound theory for us and sheds light on the man who developed it. She describes different applications of the theory, its limitations, the texts it illuminates, and its relevance to 21st-century readings.

Join us as we discuss the single most important theoretical model in the history of Hemingway studies and its iconic creator.

One True Podcast continues our summer book club on The Purple Land, the 1885 novel written by W.H. Hudson and read and re-read by Robert Cohn.

In this episode, we explore Chapters 12-20. We revisit the picaresque plot structure, discuss how the narrative moves between romance and revolution, explore how Hudson takes up the question of cultural relativism, and draw connections to The Sun Also Rises.

We hope you’ll join us in this close read of The Purple Land. We are using the handsome University of Wisconsin Press edition with an Introduction written by former One True Podcast guest, our friend Ilan Stavans.

Thank you as always for your support of One True Podcast!

On the happy occasion of Mark’s new Norton Library edition of A Farewell to Arms, One True Podcast goes deep into its vault. We are at last releasing to the general public one of our seldom-heard Patreon episodes, an exploration of the final chapter of A Farewell to Arms, the epic and heart-wrenching chapter 41.

We discuss Catherine’s behavior, the narrative’s disproportionate focus on Frederic as a witness, his eating and drinking, the medical staff, a couple of one true sentences, the ethics of reading someone else’s newspaper, and the notion that the ending of this novel may or may not represent Hemingway’s worldview.

After the unearthed Patreon episode, we continue the discussion, exploring Hemingway’s alternate endings and what that tells us about Hemingway’s artistic process.

We hope you’ll enjoy this wide-ranging discussion, ideally in the rain.

One True Podcast ushers in the summer by reading a book that is not by Hemingway, but is Hemingway-relevant: W.H. Hudson’s The Purple Land, the 1885 novel that Jake Barnes name-drops in The Sun Also Rises and then weaponizes to criticize Robert Cohn.

This episode covers the first 11 chapters, where we discuss the Hemingway-Hudson connection, this novel’s picaresque structure, the dramatic situation, the setting, and the various adventures that our hero experiences, including the problematic nature of his “intensely amorous” inclinations.

We hope you’ll join us in this slow read of The Purple Land. We are using the handsome University of Wisconsin Press edition with an Introduction written by former One True Podcast guest, our friend Ilan Stavans.

Thank you as always for your support of One True Podcast!

One True Podcast again toasts to the centenary of Hemingway’s In Our Time by examining “Cat in the Rain,” one of its so-called “marriage tales.” 

We welcome John Beall to discuss the story’s setting, its composition, the dynamic of the marriage, its autobiographical inspiration, and how this story fits in to Hemingway’s other “frosty” marriages. We explore the symbolism of the cat, the omnipresence of the rain, repetition in the story… and we even wonder: what the heck is that guy reading that’s so interesting?

John Beall – author of the new book Hemingway’s Art of Revision: The Making of the Short Fiction – expertly guides us through the ambiguities of this tense, elliptical story. Thanks for listening! 

“Who Murdered the Vets?” is one of the most important non-fiction pieces Hemingway ever wrote. This 1935 article for New Masses excoriated the Roosevelt administration’s careless supervision of World War I veterans who died during the Labor Day hurricane while they were living in workcamps along the Keys. Stationed there to help to build the overseas highway, more than 250 died as victims of the cataclysmic storm.

Hemingway wrote what he called his “2800 words of dynamite” in a frothing rage, furious at the irresponsibility of the government, shocked at what he had witnessed firsthand, and grieving for the veterans who survived the Great War, only to lose their lives at home. 

To discuss this explosive article and its crucial context, we welcome James H. Meredith, the former President of the Hemingway Society. Jim’s perspective walks us through Hemingway’s approach to this tragedy and how he composed such a vivid, emotional polemic. 

She called him “the most fascinating man I know.” He called her “the Kraut.”  Hemingway’s relationship with the iconic entertainer Marlene Dietrich has been an intriguing wrinkle to both of their careers and lives. To separate myth from fact, and to allow us to learn more about Miss Dietrich and her singular accomplishments in song and cinema, we welcome Peter Riva, the grandson of the legendary actress.

In this episode, we explore how they met, why they clicked so powerfully, why they remained platonic, how she felt about his writing, and how he felt about her film performances. Peter Riva is a candid, generous guest who provides a unique perspective to Dietrich as a grandma and Hemingway as a memorable houseguest.

Join us for this discussion about the Hemingway-Dietrich relationship… and stay tuned for some surprise outro music! 

After Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, became aware of his extramarital affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, she became resigned to the end of their marriage. Before she agreed to the divorce, however, she issued an extraordinary provision to Hemingway and Pauline: that they spend one hundred days apart! If they still wanted to stay together after those hundred days, Hadley would consent to the divorce.

To explore this bizarre episode in Hemingway’s life, we welcome Gioia Diliberto, biographer of Hadley Richardson, and Adam Long, director of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum, the family home of Pauline Pfeiffer. Diliberto and Long each share details about all the members of this messy love triangle and how it forms the legacy of the phase of Hemingway’s life that would inspire A Moveable Feast.

We discuss who these people were in 1926 and what they wanted, what motivated this 100-Day Challenge, all of its implications, and its outcome.

The great Italian scholar Martina Mastandrea, who spoke with us in 2023 to discuss "In Another Country," joins us again to talk about another Hemingway tale: "Out of Season."

After Mastandrea treats us to an Italian rendition of the opening to "Out of Season," we explore many aspects of the story, including its biographical inspiration, connections to other Hemingway texts (like "Cat in the Rain" and "Hills Like White Elephants"), the role Cortina plays as a setting, and ways to read the famous ending.  

This celebrated story is always in-season, so please join us as Martina Mastandrea guides us through it!

When Ernest Hemingway was interviewed by George Plimpton in 1958, he listed Johann Sebastian Bach fourth among those forebears he learned the most from. “I should think,” he told Plimpton, “what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.” It isn’t. 

So, to help us understand how Bach influenced Hemingway's writing – in particular the first page of A Farewell to Arms – we welcome organist and Bach scholar, David Yearsley.

With an expert to guide us, we explore Bach's biography and connections between these two artistic titans, discussing which of Bach's works Hemingway responded to most powerfully and how the music of “Mr. Johann” finds its way into Hemingway’s WWI novel as well as other writings, such as To Have and Have Not. 

We are also privileged that David Yearsley agreed to play some Bach for us to illustrate counterpoint and other related ideas, so we hope you enjoy this special show!

Join us as Carl Eby takes us into the nooks and crannies of the Hemingway archives at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. We will discuss the legendary JFK #112 and JFK #113, two discarded and highly provocative chapters from Hemingway’s posthumous novel Islands in the Stream.

We explore where the discarded material in the JFK Library fits into Islands in the Stream, who cut it and why, and how Hemingway studies would have been different if the novel had included this charged material. We also closely examine certain words from these files, such as "perversions" and "surprize" and “devil.” 

Eby is President of the Hemingway Society and has focused much of his research on Hemingway's posthumous work. Recently, he published Reading Hemingway's The Garden of Eden for Kent State University Press’s Reading Hemingway series. Eby has joined us previously for an episode on The Garden of Eden manuscripts, and he also inaugurated our One True Sentence series with One True Sentence #1, a discussion of Hemingway's "Paris 1922" sketches. 

Thanks for your continued support of One True Podcast!

One True Podcast begins this year’s occasional commemoration of In Our Time’s 100th anniversary with a show devoted to one of its highlights. To discuss Hemingway’s classic story “Soldier’s Home,” we invite the author of Soldiers Once and Still, Alex Vernon.

We discuss Harold Krebs and his war experience on the Western Front of World War I, his painful reentry into his former life, and his strained relationship with his mother. We also examine the extraordinary language Hemingway uses to capture Krebs's tortured consciousness and explore this story’s placement among Hemingway’s career of chronicling men at war. As the author of the first literary biography of Tim O’Brien, Alex describes Krebs’s frustration at the difficulty of telling his own true war stories and compares it with the same idea in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

On this, our 150th episode of One True Podcast, join us for a conversation about an essential Hemingway short story. Thank you for listening, rating the program, and spreading the word! 

Seventy-five years ago, Lillian Ross published “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” in The New Yorker, her longform profile of Hemingway’s 1950 visit to New York City. Ross spent time with Hemingway as he shopped for a coat, visited with Marlene Dietrich, took his son Patrick to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, met with Charles Scribner, and talked enthusiastically about his forthcoming novel, Across the River and into the Trees.

This profile has been polarizing since its publication: Did Ross deliver a subtle takedown? Did Hemingway embarrass himself with his odd mannerisms? Should Hemingway never have agreed to it? Should The New Yorker never have published it? Is this, ultimately, the most intimate and penetrating portrait of the later Hemingway ever written?

To explore this iconic profile and the journalist who wrote it, we welcome Susan Morrison, who serves as Lillian Ross’s literary executor. Morrison is the Articles Editor at The New Yorker and the author of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. 

We hope you enjoy this episode and always remember: “what you win in Boston, you lose in Chicago!” 

What was Ernest Hemingway doing in 1925? Where was he? What were his important relationships? What were his challenges? What was he writing?

1925 is the year that put Hemingway on the map. To guide us through this crucial year, we welcome back J. Gerald Kennedy, author of Imagining Paris, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of In Our Time, and co-editor of what will become the final volume of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. In this episode, we discuss the publication of In Our Time and the events that would inspire The Sun Also Rises; Hemingway's competitive streak and network of famous friends and rivals; the painting he bought and the influence of modern art on his writing; and much more.

We hope you enjoy one of our favorite traditions, spending our first show of the new year by going back one hundred years to explore Hemingway’s life, work, and world. Happy New Year! 

Welcome to our eighteenth and final show celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

In this quirky narrative that would come to be known as “L’Envoi” in the following year’s In Our Time collection, our narrator meets a king and a queen in the garden, leading us to a discussion of The Beatles, gardens in in our time, Hemingway’s complex use of narrative perspective, the role of America within all of the various settings of these sketches, how his journalism spawns his fiction, and more. We also hand out awards for Favorite Sketch, Favorite Character, and Most Memorable Image in in our time.

Join us -- one more time -- as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

Happy holidays from One True Podcast, and it wouldn’t be the holiday season without Suzanne del Gizzo—the celebrated editor of The Hemingway Review—here to discuss another one of Hemingway’s seasonally appropriate works. In previous years, we have talked together about “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” “Christmas on the Roof of the World,” “The Christmas Gift,” and “A North of Italy Christmas.” This year, we explore “The Blind Man’s Christmas Eve,” an article Hemingway wrote for The Toronto Star in December 1923.

With Suzanne, we place the story in its historical and biographical contexts, delve into the relationship between the main character and the curious narrative perspective, examine how physical and metaphorical blindness works in the story, and connect the story to other Hemingway works such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," "Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog," and Islands in the Stream. We also think about the importance of the song “My Old Kentucky Home,” which the main character hears an Italian organ grinder play.

As a special gift to our listeners, we begin the episode with a reading of “The Blind Man’s Christmas Eve” by former guest Mackenzie Astin, star of The Facts of Life, The Magicians, and In Love and War, where he played the young Henry Villard opposite Chris O’Donnell’s Hemingway and Sandra Bullock’s Agnes von Kurowsky. We also end the episode with another treat--a moving rendition of "My Old Kentucky Home" by Hemingway scholar Michael Kim Roos, who appeared as a guest on one of our previous shows on A Farewell to Arms.

Thanks for another great year, everybody. Enjoy!

Welcome to the seventeenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

Hemingway captures a scene out of the American newspapers, the execution by hanging of an Italian-American mobster, Sam Cardinella. We discuss Hemingway’s career-long treatment of executions and the behavior of those facing death, along with the detached behavior of those administering punishment. We parse out the discrepancy of a vocabulary word, and we also analyze the eventual placement of this episode into the dreamscape of a young Nick Adams. The power of this chapter represents one of the great achievements of this book.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

Ruchika Tomar, the 2020 PEN/Hemingway winner for A Prayer for Travelers, shares her one true sentence from “A Very Short Story.” 

Welcome to the sixteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

In this episode, Maera is gored and dies in a masterfully cinematic way. We explore Hemingway's description of the bullfighter's death and speculate about why Hemingway decided to kill off his character "Maera" when the real bullfighter was still alive when in our time was published. We also draw comparisons between this vignette and other Hemingway works like "A Banal Story" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and consider its important placement in the later short story sequence of 1925.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

Welcome to the fifteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

This episode on Maera and Luis extends Hemingway’s exploration of bullfighting and violence. We begin by discussing the narrator's identity, how it is revealed in the story, and why that matters; by the end of the episode, we focus attention on the final lines of the vignette ("Yes. Yes. Yes.), exploring the relationship between Hemingway's work and Molly Bloom's soliloquy that ends James Joyce's Ulysses. Throughout the episode, we're fascinated by the triangulation of the narrator, Maera, and Luis and how it structures this curious vignette.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

As One True Podcast winds down its ambitious year-long project of devoting an episode to each of the eighteen chapters in in our time, we visit with the man who wrote the book about the book, Milton A. Cohen.

Cohen’s study of the Paris in our time, Hemingway’s Laboratory, is a keen guide through the sketches and analyzes Hemingway as a writer finding his voice. In our interview with Cohen, he describes Hemingway’s artistry, the innovations he sees in the vignettes, some of his favorite moments in the book, and even things Hemingway left out from the manuscript.

Join us as Milton A. Cohen guides us through in our time!

Robert W. Trogdon joins One True Podcast to share the treasures of the new Library of America volume he has edited: A Farewell to Arms and Other Writings, 1927-1932. We discuss Hemingway and his life during those magical, turbulent years, and also the great work he produced.

From his second short story collection, Men Without Women to his second novel, A Farewell to Arms, to the unexpected turn his career takes, the bullfighting treatise titled Death in the Afternoon, Trogdon guides us through these works and these eventful years. Trogdon also discusses the various textual issues he faced while editing this volume, including the expletives of A Farewell to Arms, an inverted paragraph that nobody knew about, and Hemingway’s vision for the bullfighting photographs in Death in the Afternoon.

Join us as we discuss the second Hemingway offering from the Library of America with its editor! 

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 the stylistic function of so many present participles in the vignette; and we touch on connections to The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon, and Across the River and Into the Trees.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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 incompetent (but self-aware) matador, the notion of throwing things at sporting events, and the painful recognition of realizing you’re just not that good at something.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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.

This episode on “Cross-Country Snow” is the latest installment of One True Podcast’s ambitious project to tackle every Hemingway short story. Join us for this latest effort! 

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 The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon. Just as with previous vignettes, we also focus time on the last sentence and why the chapter ends the way it does.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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 classical painters, particularly the work of Mantegna? What are the connections between this story and other Hemingway works like A Farewell to Arms? In this episode, we respond to these questions and many more as we delve into a vignette that often gets glossed over! 

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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.

We learn about Hemingway’s perspective about the war, the way the stories set the groundwork for For Whom the Bell Tolls, his focus on “dignity” in the stories, and the ambiguity of his endings. This conversation will inspire you to visit or revisit these narratives, armed with the context Guill and Lena provide.

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 as one of the great characters of Hemingway’s short fiction.

“Today Is Friday” continues One True Podcast’s ambitious project of tackling every Hemingway short story. Join us for this latest effort! 

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 attitude, the presence of smooth-talking Italians, and an ocean in between them. Hemingway turned the early trauma of a Dear John letter into this raw, painful self-examination that attempted to exorcise his own experiences. In this episode we also explore how this chapter provides a fascinating precis of this relationship’s fuller articulation in A Farewell to Arms.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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 subtle division emerges between Drevitts and Boyle and how Hemingway’s characters are able to say things without stating them.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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 correspondents: Arnold Gingrich of Esquire, Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s, Jane Mason, critic Ivan Kashkin, John Dos Passos, and more.

Join us as we visit once again with the Hemingway Letters team to explore Hemingway’s letters from these crucial years!

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 short story. Along the way, we ponder the various religious and existential themes that emerge as well as the bilingual nature of the story and how to read and appreciate the story in translation.

Join us as we meet up with two waiters and an old man in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

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 connections to other works such as A Farewell to Arms and "A Way You'll Never Be."

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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 vignette?  Is the protagonist Nick Adams and, if so, what do we make of the various, inconsistent accounts of his war wounding here and in other stories. And much more. 

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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, and more. We discuss what the war meant to Hemingway and his writing that would follow, and how many of his relationships would never be the same. 

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 characters and dialogue so compelling in The Sun Also Rises, and discusses her own creative process.

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 Tintoretto's Crucifixion.   We also continue examining how the first third of the book starts cohering into a larger project.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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 in our time before it became In Our Time!

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 the founder of Faulkner Studies in the UK and has written the superb book, William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound. 

Honeini expertly guides us through Hemingway and Faulkner’s lives, works, and relationship as One True Podcast continues its investigation of Hemingway’s many rivalries.