One True Podcast

The Great Gatsby celebrates its 100th birthday this year, and you knew that One True Podcast couldn’t let 2025 go by without joining the celebration. We mark the centenary of this great American novel by marking its importance in American literary history as well as the life and career of Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald scholar William Blazek visits us from his post at Liverpool Hope University to di...

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...

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 fi...

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 histo...

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 Mave...

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...

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 th...

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...

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...