One True Podcast

On this episode of One True Podcast, we are joined by Dr. Andrew Farah, author of Hemingway’s Brain , who argues that Hemingway was misdiagnosed and suffered from dementia in his later years.  With a perspective and base of knowledge no other commentator has ever offered, Dr. Farah chronicles Hemingway’s lifetime of mental illness, addiction, and accidents, identifying how a 21st-century doctor wo...

Lesley Blume joins One True Podcast to discuss Everybody Behaves Badly , her bestselling profile of the background of The Sun Also Rises .    Blume talks about Paris and Pamplona in the 1920s, the actual people who inspired Hemingway’s unforgettable characters, and the impact the novel has had on literature and culture for almost a century.  Join us for a lively conversation with the award-winning...

One True Podcast continues its exploration of the places that defined Hemingway and that Hemingway helped define. We return to Cuba, joined by Jeffrey DeLaurentis, the man President Obama nominated to serve as ambassador to Cuba.   During the discussion, Ambassador DeLaurentis draws from his personal experiences with the Cuban government and Cuban citizens, as well as his decades of international...

On this episode we welcome Scott Donaldson, the legendary Hemingway biographer, to discuss the iceberg principle of writing. He explores the function of Hemingway’s iceberg style, examines various examples of it at work, and considers potential influences on Hemingway's "trademark" style of omission.  As a literary biographer and one of the most perceptive and prolific living schola...

In this episode, the brilliant historian Mark Thompson, author of the magisterial The White War , separates fact from fiction as he analyzes Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms , including its epic depiction of the devastating Caporetto retreat. In writing his great war novel, Hemingway dramatically recreated the Italian Front of World War I by consulting histories, maps, novels, and others’ first...

One True Podcast took the occasion of Toni Morrison’s death to consider the way race emerges as a key factor in Hemingway’s writing. In this episode, we turn to one of the most prominent Hemingway scholars on this issue, North Carolina State’s Marc Dudley. During the interview, Dudley reflects on Morrison’s searing criticisms of Hemingway’s treatment of minority characters, and extends his thought...

In this episode, the inimitable Susan Beegel joins producer Michael Von Cannon for a special "Scholar's Spotlight" episode. Beegel tells Michael about her article "Fish Tale: A History of the L.C. Bates Museum Marlin, Taxidermist Fred C.N. Parke, and Ernest Hemingway," which appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of the Hemingway Review . Listen in as she unlocks the mysteries su...

Stacy Keach joins the show to reflect on his legendary career, particularly his portrayal of Hemingway on the stage, in the classic miniseries, and in his audio recording of short stories.  Keach compares the art of acting to the act of writing and gets to the heart of Hemingway’s knack for conveying emotion in spare prose.  He reflects on the many adaptations of Hemingway novels and his friendshi...

Alex Vernon joins the show to discuss one of Hemingway’s major themes: men at war.  He penetrates the myth of Hemingway-as-warmonger, isolates some of the writer's most evocative war passages, and even reflects on his own war experiences in the Middle East.  Vernon also tracks Hemingway’s development from the young eyewitness of World War I to the keen partisan of the Spanish Civil War, and f...

This episode is a journey into the culture and history of Cuba. Given the undeniable importance of Cuba in Hemingway’s life and legacy, Hemingway readers will learn a lot more about it from one of the preeminent scholars, thinkers, and writers on Cuba, Dr. Julia E. Sweig. Dr. Sweig discusses US-Cuba relations, their tumultuous history, her meetings with Fidel Castro, and her sense of what we might...

In this episode, we explore Hemingway and John Dos Passos, their service in the American Red Cross during World War I, their writing careers, and their doomed friendship.  In order to do so, we chat with the man who wrote the book on it.  James McGrath Morris’s The Ambulance Drivers chronicles the highs and lows of their relationship and their legacies.  As well, Morris talks about the mystery sur...

Today's show places Ernest Hemingway alongside one of his artistic contemporaries: F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Part friendship and part rivalry, their complex relationship has all the twists and turns of a good novel about two characters that, at least on the surface, seem vastly different.   There's some truth to these differences but, like a good story, there's a fair share of fiction. ...