One True Podcast

In our fourth episode celebrating the centenary of The Sun Also Rises, we examine the theme of religion and its role in the novel.

From the title, the epigraphs, the pilgrims on the train, Jake’s self-conscious prayer, the festival of San Fermín, and the idea of fishing as a religious experience, Larry Grimes guides us through this vast topic and shows Hemingway’s religious design in The Sun Also Rises. Grimes also discusses the min...

Legendary scholar Jackson Bryer joins us once again, this time to discuss one controversial moment in Hemingway’s career, his vicious “poor Scott Fitzgerald” swipe in the original publication of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

We discuss the publication history of this graceless insult, what it says about Hemingway and what it says about Fitzgerald. We go on to discuss “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as a story and the ways that wealth emerg...

In the midst of our centenary festivities around The Sun Also Rises, One True Podcast takes an opportunity to celebrate another Hemingway work published in 1926: The Torrents of Spring. 

Elena Zolotariov, author of "'Black and Red Laughter': Subverting Whiteness in Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring" (from the Fall 2023 issue of the Hemingway Review), joins us to offer an exploration and even defense of Hemingway...

In our third episode celebrating the centenary of The Sun Also Rises, we examine the novel’s anti-Semitic streak and the central role of its Jewish character, Robert Cohn.

We welcome the scholar Jeremy Kaye of Moorpark College for a discussion about this incendiary theme, the difference between Hemingway’s anti-Semitism and his characters, Cohn’s Jewish masculinity, his function as a scapegoat, the historical inspiration for Cohn, a...

On the happy occasion of the publication of Francesca Wade’s magnificent Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, we speak with the biographer about Stein’s life, work, and complicated relationships.

Wade describes her access to new Stein archives that afforded her a fresh look on the enigmatic writer, the difference between Stein's legend and her life, the particular value of her various publications, and what she was ultimately trying t...

In our second episode devoted to the centenary of The Sun Also Rises, we turn our focus to the beloved Count Mippipopolous. 

He’s an epicurean and an entrepreneur; he’s battle-tested, arrow-wounded, champagne-enjoying, no-dancing, business-tripping, generous-tipping... and he’s always in love. We discuss his role in the novel, his relationship with Brett and Jake, Hemingway’s original plan for him in the manuscript, and how he emerg...

We are thrilled to welcome Susan Shillinglaw, the preeminent John Steinbeck scholar, to discuss one of Hemingway’s contemporaries and fellow Nobel laureates. 

Although Hemingway and Steinbeck are not discussed comparatively as frequently as some of his other fellow literary titans, Prof. Shillinglaw talks about Steinbeck’s life, career, and temperament in ways that will inspire us to remap the overlaps between these two men. We expl...

Throughout the course of this year, we will celebrate the centenary of The Sun Also Rises by inviting guests on the show to talk about fascinating aspects of the book and its rich history. 

In this episode, we explore how the book was actually written—from a sloppy first draft to a modernist masterpiece. What will tracing this composition history tells us about the evolution of The Sun Also Rises and Hemingway’s own development as a...

One True Podcast is back with a look at another Hemingway short story, an under-discussed gem from Winner Take Nothing. One of the weirdest works in his career, “Homage to Switzerland” is a Modernist experiment that tells a similar story three times, each one set in a different Swiss train station. 

To walk us through this bizarre tale, we call on excellent Hemingway scholar and actual citizen of Switzerland, Boris Vejdovksy, profes...

Happy New Year from One True Podcast! We look forward to a rich, exciting 2026 by looking back to 1926.

In our first show of the year, we ask an esteemed guest to take us back exactly one hundred years to see what was happening in Hemingway’s life, work, and world. So, to guide us through Hemingway’s 1926 -- his travels, his relationships, his publishing, and his writing – we welcome the great Hemingway scholar Ross K. Tangedal. 

For...

Thank you for making 2025 such a special year for One True Podcast! Together, we devoted shows to the centenary of In Our Time, to our One True Book Club discussion of W.H. Hudson’s The Purple Land, to the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, and to so much more. We’re so grateful to all of our amazing guests for enriching and enlivening our program, and to all of our listeners for their loyalty.

As our gift back to you, we close ...

One True Podcast would never let 2025 end without one more episode celebrating the centenary of In Our Time, so today we discuss a classic short story from that collection: “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.”

Scholar (and podcaster) Scott Yarbrough visits us from Charleston to lead us through the many elements of this great story: Dr. Adams’s quarrel with Dick Boulton, the doctor’s icy relationship with his wife, and finally his mom...

The prominent Faulkner scholar Ahmed Honeini first joined us in 2024 to discuss the rivalry and intertextuality between Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

Clearly, in a topic so vast, devoted to the two leading titans of 20th-century American literature, one puny, inexhaustible episode was not enough. So, Ahmed Honeini agreed to come back onto One True Podcast to continue our pursuit of Hemingway and his contemporaries. We discu...

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 discuss the novel’s legacy, its glorio...

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 for writing novels, and much more.

Don...

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 final days.

We learn what was occupying...

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 history, his literary aspirations, and of...

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 Maverick: Selected Letters and War Writi...

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 of the Hemingway Letters Project, t...