One True Podcast

One True Podcast welcomes the great Larry Grimes to discuss “Today Is Friday,” the curious playlet from Men Without Women about three Roman soldiers and a Jewish barman discussing Jesus’s crucifixion.This interview explores the resonance of the story and what it tells us about Hemingway’s lifelong quest for the religious experience. We discuss Hemingway’s fascination with executions, masculine Christianity, and hybrid religions. We also explore how the 3rd Roman Soldier unexpectedly emerges as one of the great characters of Hemingway’s short fiction.“Today Is Friday” continues One True Podcast’s ambitious project of tackling every Hemingway short story. Join us for this latest effort! 

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 (later Luz), doomed due to an insurmountable age gap, our hero’s bad attitude, the presence of smooth-talking Italians, and an ocean in between them. Hemingway turned the early trauma of a Dear John letter into this raw, painful self-examination that attempted to exorcise his own experiences. In this episode we also explore how this chapter provides a fascinating precis of this relationship’s fuller articulation in A Farewell to Arms.Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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 specific language renders a complex scene. Through our conversation, the subtle division emerges between Drevitts and Boyle and how Hemingway’s characters are able to say things without stating them.Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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 discuss Hemingway’s relationships with his correspondents: Arnold Gingrich of Esquire, Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s, Jane Mason, critic Ivan Kashkin, John Dos Passos, and more.Join us as we visit once again with the Hemingway Letters team to explore Hemingway’s letters from these crucial years!

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.In this conversation, we examine key dynamics between the major characters in this very short story. Along the way, we ponder the various religious and existential themes that emerge as well as the bilingual nature of the story and how to read and appreciate the story in translation.Join us as we meet up with two waiters and an old man in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

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 religion, try to gain a sense of the narrator's identity, and draw connections to other works such as A Farewell to Arms and "A Way You'll Never Be."Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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 about the "wound theory." We also take on various questions: Is Rinaldi dead by the end of the vignette?  Is the protagonist Nick Adams and, if so, what do we make of the various, inconsistent accounts of his war wounding here and in other stories. And much more.  Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!

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 of Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, John Dos Passos, Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and more. We discuss what the war meant to Hemingway and his writing that would follow, and how many of his relationships would never be the same. 

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 questions about how Hemingway drafted the sentence, examines what makes certain characters and dialogue so compelling in The Sun Also Rises, and discusses her own creative process.

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, such as A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and even Tintoretto's Crucifixion.   We also continue examining how the first third of the book starts cohering into a larger project.Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!