One True Podcast

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 h...

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...

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...

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 19...

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 fasci...

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...

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 w...

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-St...

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&...

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...

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 wri...

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...

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,...

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 tha...

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 .

We welcome aboard Paul Hendrickson for a discussion about his poignant book on Hemingway’s beloved Pilar , the best-selling Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Los t. Hendrickson explores Pilar as a significant constant in Hemingway's life and as an illuminating metaphor for Hemingway's work.  During the interview, he also talks about the fascinating process of writing thi...

We welcome Mark Salter, who served as Senator John McCain's advisor and speechwriter, to discuss the senator's lifelong passion for the works of Ernest Hemingway. From his first encounter with For Whom the Bell Tolls to his final consideration of the elegiac “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Salter speaks movingly about Senator McCain's engagement with Hemingway’s writing and how it infor...

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout shares her one true sentence from Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."