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 call in scholar Ilan Stavans, former OTP guest and editor of the U of Wisconsin Press edition of The...
Aug 11, 2025•58 min
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 operations of the present-day Hemingway cats, herding all fifty-seven of them on a daily basis. Next,...
Jul 31, 2025•1 hr 15 min
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, history, and gender. Young inspired generations of scholars and also generated harsh responses, includin...
Jul 17, 2025•1 hr 1 min
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 Rises . We hope you’ll join us in this close read of The Purple Land . We are using the handsome Univers...
Jul 03, 2025•55 min
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 as a witness, his eating and drinking, the medical staff, a couple of one true sentences, the ethics...
Jun 19, 2025•1 hr 15 min
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 situation, the setting, and the various adventures that our hero experiences, including the problematic nat...
Jun 05, 2025•1 hr
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 omnipresence of the rain, repetition in the story… and we even wonder: what the heck is that guy reading that’s ...
May 19, 2025•59 min
“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 cataclysmic storm. Hemingway wrote what he called his “2800 words of dynamite” in a frothing rage, fu...
May 05, 2025•1 hr
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 actress. In this episode, we explore how they met, why they clicked so powerfully, why they remained p...
Apr 21, 2025•52 min
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. To explore this bizarre episode in Hemingway’s life, we welcome Gioia Diliberto, biographer of Hadley...
Apr 07, 2025•59 min
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 texts (like "Cat in the Rain" and "Hills Like White Elephants"), the role Cortina plays as a setting, and ways to read the famous ...
Mar 24, 2025•53 min
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 of A Farewell to Arms – we welcome organist and Bach scholar, David Yearsley. With an expert to guide us, ...
Mar 10, 2025•57 min
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 and why, and how Hemingway studies would have been different if the novel had included this charged m...
Feb 24, 2025•51 min
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 strained relationship with his mother. We also examine the extraordinary language Hemingway uses to captu...
Feb 10, 2025•1 hr 1 min
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, Across the River and into the Trees. This profile has been polarizing since its publication: Did Ross d...
Jan 27, 2025•45 min
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 The Letters of Ernest Hemingway . In this episode, we discuss the publication of In Our Time and the...
Jan 13, 2025•1 hr 2 min
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 narrative perspective, the role of America within all of the various settings of these sketches, how h...
Dec 30, 2024•53 min
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.” This year, we explore “The Blind Man’s Christmas Eve,” an article Hemingway wrote for The Toronto Star...
Dec 23, 2024•1 hr 7 min
Welcome to the seventeenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . Hemingway captures a scene out of the American newspapers, the execution by hanging of an Italian-American mobster, Sam Cardinella. We discuss Hemingway’s career-long treatment of executions and the behavior of those facing death, along with the detached behavior of those administering punishment. We parse out the discrepancy of a vocabulary word, and we...
Dec 16, 2024•55 min
Ruchika Tomar, the 2020 PEN/Hemingway winner for A Prayer for Travelers , shares her one true sentence from “A Very Short Story.”
Dec 09, 2024•38 min
Welcome to the sixteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . In this episode, Maera is gored and dies in a masterfully cinematic way. We explore Hemingway's description of the bullfighter's death and speculate about why Hemingway decided to kill off his character "Maera" when the real bullfighter was still alive when in our time was published. We also draw comparisons between this vignette and other Hemingway works ...
Nov 29, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Welcome to the fifteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . This episode on Maera and Luis extends Hemingway’s exploration of bullfighting and violence. We begin by discussing the narrator's identity, how it is revealed in the story, and why that matters; by the end of the episode, we focus attention on the final lines of the vignette ("Yes. Yes. Yes.), exploring the relationship between Hemingway's work and Molly ...
Nov 25, 2024•49 min
As One True Podcast winds down its ambitious year-long project of devoting an episode to each of the eighteen chapters in in our time , we visit with the man who wrote the book about the book, Milton A. Cohen. Cohen’s study of the Paris in our time, Hemingway’s Laboratory , is a keen guide through the sketches and analyzes Hemingway as a writer finding his voice. In our interview with Cohen, he describes Hemingway’s artistry, the innovations he sees in the vignettes, some of his favorite moments...
Nov 11, 2024•52 min
Robert W. Trogdon joins One True Podcast to share the treasures of the new Library of America volume he has edited: A Farewell to Arms and Other Writings, 1927-1932. We discuss Hemingway and his life during those magical, turbulent years, and also the great work he produced. From his second short story collection, Men Without Women to his second novel, A Farewell to Arms, to the unexpected turn his career takes, the bullfighting treatise titled Death in the Afternoon , Trogdon guides us through ...
Oct 28, 2024•53 min
Welcome to the fourteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . This episode continues Hemingway’s exploration of bullfighting and violence through a study of Nicanor Villalta. In two short paragraphs, Hemingway masterfully captures the movement of matador and bull, leading up to the pivotal image where "Villalta became one with the bull." We discuss how Hemingway depicts good vs. bad bullfighters; we consider the sty...
Oct 17, 2024•42 min
Welcome to the thirteenth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . This episode continues Hemingway’s exploration of bullfighting and violence. This chapter is the second of the five consecutive bullfighting sketches Hemingway placed towards the end of in our time. A raucous crowd objects to a bad bullfight, leading to the humiliating cutting of a matador’s pigtails. We discuss the narrator’s relationship to the incompet...
Oct 14, 2024•46 min
Stewart O’Nan, the prolific author of West of Sunset and other works of fiction and non-fiction, shares his one true sentence from “The End of Something.”
Sep 26, 2024•40 min
One True Podcast takes on another classic Hemingway short story as Olivia Carr Edenfield joins us to discuss “Cross-Country Snow,” the beloved Nick Adams story from In Our Time . Prof. Edenfield discusses how this skiing trip links Nick’s past with his future, how it fits as a crucial pivot in the story cycle, the Nick-George relationship, the mysterious waitress, the wonderful description of skiing, how the story reflects Hemingway’s biography of the mid-1920s … and that curious title. This epi...
Sep 16, 2024•54 min
Welcome to the twelfth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . In this episode, we discuss Hemingway's powerful depiction of a bullfighting scene between bull and horse. We start out with that famous "whack whacked" opening before turning to what might be an equally important and seriously overlooked (by us!) part of the story. In addition, we read this vignette in light of Hemingway's remarks about gored horses from Th...
Sep 05, 2024•50 min
Welcome to the eleventh of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time . Listeners might be familiar with this vignette as the short story "The Revolutionist" from Hemingway's bigger collection In Our Time published in 1925. How does the vignette characterize the post-WWI communist revolution and its revolutionaries as well as counter-responses in Hungary, Italy, and Switzerland? Why does the narrator seem to fixate on classical...
Sep 02, 2024•58 min
