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 minor roles of Harris and Montoya and explains why Jake is such ...

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's neglected satire. In this episode, we talk about how and why Hemingw...

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 to capture with her singular writing style. Wade also explores Stei...

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 explore Steinbeck’s fondness for “The Butterfly and the Tank...

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, professor at the University of Lausanne. Vejdovksy explains th...

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 2025 in our favorite of ways: we welcome Suzanne del Gizzo on...

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 discuss Faulkner’s great works, how his concept of mortality compa...

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’t forget to submit your nomination for One True Book Club 2...

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 course his intimate relationship with Hemingway. They d...

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, to share her memories of Patrick, including his contribut...

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 Th...

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, inclu...

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 ethic...