One True Podcast

Tim O'Brien, the author of The Things They Carried, Dad's Maybe Book, and America Fantastica, shares his one true sentence from The Sun Also Rises. Toward the end of the episode, we also reflect on Tim's riveting speech at Dominican University during the 2016 Hemingway Society conference in Oak Park, Illinois.

Join us for a special episode devoted to Lieutenant Rinaldo Rinaldi from A Farewell to Arms!

On this episode, scholar Michael Kim Roos (co-author of the essential Reading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms) explores the many dimensions of this beloved character. We discuss Rinaldi’s role as Frederic Henry’s best friend, his development over the course of the novel, Hemingway’s historical inspiration for this character, and the way Rinaldi, a man of science and sensualism, represents one of the novel’s most important themes. In addition, we cover Rinaldi’s iconic appearance as Nick Adams’s audience in Chapter VI of In Our Time. 

“How do you like that, baby?”

Have you ever read “The Porter”? In this episode, we take you to a seldom-visited corner of Hemingway’s short story catalogue to discuss this fascinating outtake from his discarded novel about a father-son train trip across the United States into Canada.

For guidance over this unfamiliar terrain, we turn to the great Ian Marshall, who explains the racial, class, and historical elements of this tale. We discuss how Hemingway captures the American landscape, the father-son relationship, where this story fits into Hemingway’s career, and even how “The Porter” relates to Johnny Cash’s “Hey Porter.”

Join us as Prof. Marshall helps us celebrate Hemingway’s achievements as a short story writer with this wonderful and illuminating discussion! 

Hemingway coined the phrase “grace under pressure” in a 1926 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Since then, the phrase has been repeated like a mantra to describe Hemingway’s attitude toward life and death, his definition of courage, and is regularly used as a lens through which to view his fiction.

On this episode, scholar David Wyatt joins us to discuss the significance and legacy of “grace under pressure.” Over the course of the interview, we apply the model of “grace under pressure” to various examples from Hemingway’s career: A Farewell to Arms, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and more.

Wyatt distinguishes “grace under pressure” from the simplistic descriptions of machismo that often burden considerations of Hemingway’s work. Join us for this illuminating conversation on a classic Hemingway theme with a renowned Hemingway scholar! 

Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River and Small Mercies, shares his one true sentence from A Moveable Feast.

In this episode, One True Podcast takes on the white whale of Hemingway studies: the unpublished manuscript of The Garden of Eden. Although the published version we know may be shocking, the sprawling manuscript reveals even more dimensions of this challenging text and the many complexities of its author.

For this discussion, we turn to Hemingway Society President Carl Eby, who shares what he’s learned about the manuscript through more than thirty years of studying it and many, many hours in the Kennedy Archives, poring over Ernest Hemingway’s words than never made the final edit.

We learn about the composition of the novel, the African strain to the narrative, the legendary discarded subplot, the many artistic and literary allusions, Hemingway’s vision for ending the novel, and much more.

This interview was conducted as Eby’s new study Reading Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden is being published, an essential guide to the novel that explores the published edition and its manuscript in meticulous detail.

If you're interested in listening to our other episodes on The Garden of Eden, check out our interview with Tom Jenks on his trade edition of the book.

Oscar Hokeah, winner of the 2023 PEN/Hemingway Award for Calling for a Blanket Dance, shares his one true sentence from The Old Man and the Sea.

We take a look at Hemingway’s intersection with Italian Fascism by examining two of its most volatile figures, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ezra Pound.

In this episode, we talk to Lucy Hughes-Hallett, D’Annunzio’s award-winning biographer, who discusses this notorious firebrand’s military career, love affairs, and artistic legacy. Hughes-Hallett also suggests D’Annunzio’s unspoken role in Hemingway’s most famous passage from A Farewell to Arms.

Next, Lauren Arrington, author of The Poets of Rapallo, joins us to explore Pound’s poetry, his influence on other poets, his loathsome ideology, and his relationship with Hemingway.

Italian Fascism is the sad backdrop to Hemingway’s Italian experience. We hope you enjoy our conversations with these two eminent scholars!

For our 100th episode, One True Podcast investigates the legend of the lost manuscripts! 

In December 1922, Hemingway’s first wife Hadley, misplaced a suitcase filled with the young Hemingway’s unpublished writing. Since then, this episode has invited intense speculation: Was this early work stolen? Did it end up in the garbage? Did Hadley subconsciously want the work to be stolen?

In order to explore the unknowable, we turn to four novelists who each use this mysterious episode as the inspiration for a novel. Join us as Sherry Harris (The Gun Also Rises, 2019), David Berens (The Hemingway Code, 2022), Diane Gilbert Madsen (Hunting for Hemingway, 2010), and Dennis McDougal (Hemingway’s Suitcase, 2017) talk about how the manuscripts inspired their own fiction, what they think happened to the suitcase, how Hadley might have felt, and the challenge of writing about Hemingway. 

We also discuss one of our “one true sentences” that describes how Hemingway felt “in the night” after confirming that all of his work was gone. 

Enjoy this episode and all of its speculation! And thank you for supporting One True Podcast over the first one hundred episodes! 

Robert Pinsky, U.S. Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000 and author of The Figured Wheel and Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet (among other highly acclaimed works), shares his one true sentence from Hemingway's Paris Review interview.

The legendary feminist critic Judith Fetterley joins us to discuss her brilliant and incendiary work on A Farewell to Arms, a piece from 1978 that has endured as one of the definitive feminist critiques of Hemingway. 

Prof. Fetterley discusses protagonist Frederic Henry’s self-pity and self-absorption, Catherine’s obsequiousness, and Hemingway’s design of the novel that leads Fetterley to conclude that Catherine “dies because she is a woman.”  

We go on to discuss Hemingway’s style, the theme of childbirth in Hemingway’s work, and how Fetterley’s feminist views in the 1970s apply to today’s reader.  Join us for this special episode! 

We head into the heart of the sea with award-winning historian Nathaniel Philbrick to discuss Hemingway, Melville, and where these American writers share a vision and where they part. 

Philbrick discusses The Old Man and the Sea and Moby-Dick as American classics that overlap and speak to each other across the years. He also covers the short story "After the Storm" as an essential narrative of Hemingway's vision of the sea. Throughout, Philbrick examines how Hemingway and Melville have become two of American literature's most enduring figures. 

So join us for this maritime adventure with Nathaniel Philbrick, one of America's most beloved voices.

Kerri Maher, author of The Paris Bookseller, shares her one true sentence from Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

Actor Mackenzie Astin joins us to discuss the 1996 movie In Love and War, the narrative of Hemingway’s wounding in World War I and subsequent romance with nurse Agnes Von Kurowsky. 

Directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Chris O’Donnell, Sandra Bullock, Emilio Bonucci, as well as Astin, this war epic depicts the upheaval that World War I created in the life of the teenaged Hemingway and others. 

Astin discusses Attenborough’s benevolent presence on the set, the performance of the stars, Venice at sunrise, and he comments on this eternal narrative of a young man going to war, falling in love, and reconciling with the violence of the modern world.  

Ernest Hemingway’s Red Cross experience in Italy during World War I was short, but it changed the course of his life and his writing. From being wounding in July 1918 to the abrupt end to his relationship with nurse Agnes Von Kurowsky, Hemingway would revisit those traumas for the rest of his life and write about them for his entire career.

This pair of tumultuous experiences led to a fascinating book – Hemingway in Love and War – co-written by Hemingway’s hospital roommate Henry Serrano Villard and scholar James Nagel. This book collects Villard’s Red Cross memoir, Von Kurowsky’s wartime diary and letters to Hemingway, as well as Prof. Nagel’s insightful essay about Hemingway’s experiences.

For this show devoted to Hemingway in Love and War, we are lucky to be joined by both Prof. Nagel and Henry Villard's son, who produced the cinematic adaptation of the book, Dimitri Villard.