One True Podcast

Welcome to the tenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

This chapter will be familiar to many readers as the bitter narrative that would later be presented as “A Very Short Story.” Here, this vignette is the longest in this volume. Is it also the most autobiographical? We discuss the ill-fated World War I love affair between our hero and Ag (l...

Welcome to the ninth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

This chapter is the first of the vignettes set in America, a fictionalized account of a cigar store robbery that Hemingway learned about in Kansas City in 1917. We discuss this sketch’s depiction of national confusion, moral ambiguity, attitudes towards immigrants, and how Hemingway’s spe...

One True Podcast celebrates the publication of  Volume 6 of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway by welcoming two of its editors, Sandra Spanier and Verna Kale. These letters, spanning 1934-1936, find Hemingway in Key West, fishing, publishing Green Hills of Africa, producing his Esquire dispatches, making his famous reaction to the Florida hurricane of 1935, and negotiating the competing demands of life, art, business, and celebrity.

We continue our exploration of Hemingway's short stories with his masterful narrative, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." To aid us in this effort, we're joined by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, who is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico and served as the 2022 Obama Fellow at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies. Herlihy-Mera is the author of, among other works, Decolonizing American Spanish.
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Welcome to the eighth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

On the heels of the vignette about Nick's war injury, this bombardment scene evokes the idea that there are no atheists in foxholes while, at the same time, capturing the transactional nature of religion during wartime.  We discuss various ways this vignette treats the topic of reli...

Welcome to the seventh of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

In this important vignette, Hemingway depicts Nick's war injury and his "separate peace" with Rinaldi.  We discuss Hemingway's own wounding during WWI, key differences between the final version of the vignette and early drafts, and Young's influential ideas abou...

The Spanish Civil War was a brutal and maddeningly complex historical event, with enormous repercussions on Ernest Hemingway’s life and career. To guide us through the many moving parts and frayed relationships, we welcome back Amanda Vaill to One True Podcast.

Vaill’s essential book, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, guides us through the events of the war, including the private adventures o...

Julie Schumacher, author of The Dear Committee Trilogy (Dear Committee Members, The Shakespeare Requirement , and The English Experience), shares her one true sentence from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. As Schumacher explores, Hemingway's short, terse writing often leads to some "long, meandering, winding roads of sentences" like the one she's chosen for this episode. In addition, she raises intriguing qu...

Welcome to the sixth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

The scene depicts the execution of six Greek officials toward the end of 1922.  In this episode, we discuss the history of that trial and execution, the journalistic coverage of events, and Hemingway's fictional treatment of the execution. We also relate this vignette to other works,...

Welcome to the fifth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

This scene of a barricade and a retreat continues Hemingway's brilliant depictions of Battle of Mons. In this episode, we explore some historical aspects of that retreat, compare the narrative voice and point of view to chapter four, and much more. As always, we examine how these fir...

The two great titans of twentieth-century American literature – Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner – never met. They corresponded only a time or two; however, they were always on each other’s minds. Their hyper-awareness of the other’s recent work led sometimes to envy, sometimes to awe, and frequently to catty comments.

To help us learn more about these two men and their fraught relationship, we invite Prof. Ahmed Hone...

This episode will focus on the Spanish Civil War and how one particular incident – the murder of accused Fascist spy José Robles – ruptured the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.

To sort out the many moving parts to this chapter of Hemingway’s life, we welcome Stephen Koch, the author of The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles. Koch takes us through the complicated r...

Welcome to the fourth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

At 75 words, this short scene describes the Battle of Mons. To Ezra Pound, Hemingway would refer to this conflict (from August 1914 at the very beginning of the First World War) as "clear and noble." In this episode, we discuss the historical aspects of the battle, Hemingway&ap...

Welcome to the third of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

In this scene, Hemingway describes the minarets rising over the landscape overlooking the harrowing evacuation at the Greco-Turkish War in 1922. Hemingway distills the vast scope of inhumanity into the expression of one scared child. We discuss how this scene intersects with his biographi...

American modernism is a concept that is so slippery that even scholars don’t always agree on its definition. Is it a historical era, or a literary technique? Was Ernest Hemingway even a modernist? If so, which of his works are most modernistic?

For this discussion, we turn to Mark Whalan, editor of the compendious new volume, Cambridge History of American Modernism, and Karen Leick, one of its contributors, who places Hemi...

Welcome to the second of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

In this scene, Hemingway puts us into a chaotic bullfighting scene, with gorings, hooting crowds, and a kid who tries to save the day. We discuss how this early sketch prefigures Hemingway’s career-long fascination with the bullfight and the problem of depicting it.

Just two ch...

One True Podcast reads in our time! Welcome to the first of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of Hemingway’s book of vignettes.

Starting with the unforgettable opening salvo -- “Everybody was drunk” -- chapter one describes a kitchen corporal in a chaotic battery on the way to the Champagne during World War I.  We explore these 112 words and what they reveal about Hemingway’s experimentation, his challenging sty...

What was Ernest Hemingway doing in 1924? Where was he? What were his important relationships? What were his challenges? What was he writing? 

The excellent Verna Kale  -- Hemingway biographer and Associate Editor of the Hemingway Letters Project -- joins us to trace Hemingway’s experiences one hundred years ago, walking us through his biography, his letters, his finances, and even some of his poetry. According to Kale, Hem...