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...

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, hist...

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 Rise...

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...

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 situati...

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 omnipresenc...

“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 c...

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 a...

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. T...

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...

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...

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 a...

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 strai...

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, Acr...

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...

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 na...

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.” Th...

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 b...

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 w...

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 fina...

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 de...

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 hi...

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...

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...