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 …

“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 overse…

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 we…

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 hu…

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…

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 Hemingw…

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 Libra…

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 pai…

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 …

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…

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, garde…

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 Chri…

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…

Ruchika Tomar, the 2020 PEN/Hemingway winner for A Prayer for Travelers, shares her one true sentence from “A Very Short Story.”By Mark Cirino, Michael Von Cannon, and Ruchika Tomar

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…

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…

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 findi…

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 no…

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, leadi…

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…

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.”By Mark Cirino, Michael Von Cannon, and Stewart O'Nan

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 myste…

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 importa…

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 …

Javier Fuentes, the 2024 PEN/Hemingway winner for Countries of Origin, shares his one true sentence from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."By Mark Cirino, Michael Von Cannon, and Javier Fuentes

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 “Landsca…

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 Hem…

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?…

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 confu…

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 …

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 a…

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 w…

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 an…

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, …

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 ch…

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 tr…

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 v…

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 ab…

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 Pa…

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 epis…

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 …

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 A…

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."By Mark Cirino, Michael Von Cannon, and Mark Kurlansky

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 fascinati…

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 …

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 …

‘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 -- discusse…

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."By Mark Cirino, Michael Von Cannon, Cristen Hemingway Jaynes

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 discu…

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.…