One True Podcast

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 In December 1922, Hemingway’s first wife Hadley, misplaced a suitcase filled with the young Hemingway’s unpublished writing.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.

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.

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.  

One True Podcast continues our exploration of the always complicated world of Hemingway’s volatile “friendships” with an episode devoted to Gertrude Stein. We turn to scholar Barbara Will who discusses the things Miss Stein instructed Hemingway about, both personally and professionally. We cover Stein’s background and education, her depiction in A Moveable Feast, her role in Modernism, her politics during World War I and World War II, the way things ended between her and Hemingway, and some of her greatest writings. Prof. Will also explains how “There’s no there there” is a perfect illustration of Stein’s approach to art, in all its mysterious brilliance. Join us for this fascinating episode! 

Jay McInerney, (bestselling author of Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, How It Ended, and most recently Bright, Precious Days) shares his one true sentence from Hemingway's story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."