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One True Podcast reunites with the Dean of the Hemingway Short Story, the great Don Daiker!  What better way to usher in the autumn than to discuss “The Three-Day Blow,” Hemingway’s curious story from In Our Time? It is a simple tale of a couple of kids getting drunk, talking baseball and literature, but there is simmering Hemingwayesque tension beneath the surface.  Don guides us through all the elements of this story, including Bill’s function as a character, the absent presence of both Bill’s father and Marjorie, and Hemingway’s description of the Michigan setting. We also explore the story’s role as a sequel to “The End of Something.” Enjoy this seasonally appropriate episode with a drink that keeps you warm, but remember: no opening up any new bottles. Thanks as always for supporting One True Podcast! To help us keep the lights on and send a little something our way through the One True Podcast Fund. Don Daiker has joined us previously to discuss The Nick Adams Stories. As well, please enjoy Lisa Tyler’s episode on the prequel to this story, “The End of Something."

In this episode, we welcome Lesley Blume back to One True Podcast to mark the 10th anniversary of her acclaimed narrative nonfiction book Everybody Behaves Badly, which chronicles the real-life story behind Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. The conversation spans Blume's research process, Hemingway's charisma, the role of F. Scott Fitzgerald in brokering Hemingway's career, the mythological dimensions of Lady Brett Ashley, and the iconic photo on the cover of Blume's book. Throughout this wide-ranging conversation, we also discuss A Moveable Feast, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and Blume's forthcoming book A Devil's Bargain, which examines the Manson murders.  As with the rest of our episodes on The Sun Also Rises, we have supplemented our conversation with an excerpt from the audio book of The Sun Also Rises, performed by William Hurt. Thanks to Simon and Schuster for their partnership. Thank you for listening to One True Podcast! Consider donating to the Hemingway Society, including to the recently created One True Podcast Fund or the Hemingway Café Club!

Welcome to another installment of One True Podcast! A wonderful scholar, raconteur, and true devotee to the ritual of bullfighting, Larry Belcher guides us through the ways Hemingway presents bullfighting in The Sun Also Rises. We explore what bullfighting meant to Hemingway, to Jake Barnes, and its function in the novel. Larry provides historical and cultural context to this controversial and foreign aspect of The Sun Also Rises. Join us as we learn from Larry’s years of bullfighting fandom, his decades of living in Spain, running with the bulls, and working with Hemingway’s great masterpiece. Nobody ever lives their life all the way up, except for Larry Belcher.   This episode is the sixth episode One True Podcast has dedicated to the centenary of The Sun  Also Rises this year. As with the rest of the episodes, we have supplemented our conversation with Larry Belcher with an excerpt from chapter 18 of the audio book of The Sun Also Rises, performed by William Hurt. Thanks to Simon and Schuster for their partnership. So go grab your leather wine-bottles and enjoy the episode!

Virginia Evans, the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award winner for her novel The Correspondent, joins us to discuss her one true sentence from Hemingway: “You must be prepared to work always without applause."  In this episode, Evans reflects on learning to value the work itself before and after publication, especially following the unexpected success of her novel. She discusses writing intuitively, the challenges of shifting between multiple letter-writers’ voices, and braiding many plot strands tightly back to Sybil at the story’s center. In addition, Evans recounts winning the PEN/Hemingway Award and her plan to read all of Hemingway in her fortieth year. Thank you for listening to One True Podcast! Consider donating to the Hemingway Society, including to the recently created One True Podcast Fund or the Hemingway Café Club! Previous "one true sentences" are collected in: One True Sentence: Writers and Readers on Hemingway’s Art, available here.

Join us for the final installment of One True Book Club ’26! In this series of episodes, we are reading the Hemingway-relevant selection, Under Fire by Henri Barbusse, the classic French WWI novel published in 1916. This episode covers the final chapters of the novel. We discuss how Barbusse balances graphic, grotesque depictions of the dead with artistic restraint; we analyze anti-war themes throughout this section, including Corporal Bertrand's powerful speech; and we reflect on the "ray of light" symbolism at the end of the book. Throughout the discussion, we connect our reading to other works by Hemingway: “Chapter X” of In Our Time [They whack-whacked the horse…], A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Men at War, “A Natural History of the Dead," and “Soldier’s Home.” We also draw connections to other non-Hemingway works, among them J’accuse (dir. Abel Gance), Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, Bob Dylan's “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Saving Private Ryan (dir. Steven Spielberg). We are using the Penguin Classics edition with an Introduction written by Professor Jay Winter. In the second half of this episode, Winter kindly sits down with us to share his wisdom about this spectacular book! Thank you for listening to One True Podcast! Consider donating to the Hemingway Society, including to the recently created One True Podcast Fund or the Hemingway Café Club!

Welcome back to the fortieth edition of our favorite literary parlor game as our guests choose their favorite sentence from everything Hemingway ever wrote in prose, poetry, correspondence, or journalism.  In this episode, David Morrell, prolific author and creator of the iconic John Rambo character, offers his one true sentence from “In Another Country.”  Morrell – author of First Blood, The Brotherhood of the Rose, and The Successful Novelist, among many others – joins us to discuss his life in writing and reading. We discuss the importance of first sentences, Hemingway’s grammar, Morrell’s friendship with the legendary Hemingway scholar Philip Young, good writing as hypnotic, the creation of Rambo as a character, John Barth, Carl Jung, and much more! Thank you for listening to One True Podcast! Consider donating to the Hemingway Society, including to the recently created One True Podcast Fund or the Hemingway Café Club! Previous "one true sentences" are collected in: One True Sentence: Writers and Readers on Hemingway’s Art, available here.

Welcome to our fifth episode celebrating the centenary of The Sun Also Rises! On today’s show, we welcome the always excellent David Wyatt to explore the way Hemingway represents “thinking” in the novel. Although Hemingway may not be as celebrated as Faulkner, Joyce, Proust, and Woolf at depicting human consciousness, in this episode David Wyatt guides us through crucial moments in The Sun Also Rises to show Hemingway’s subtle power in dramatizing thought in action. Wyatt takes us from Jake’s bedroom to his self-conscious prayer, to his drunken reading of Turgenev in bed, to the excitement of the bullring in order to reveal how the reader gains access to Jake’s interiority, making The Sun Also Rises a psychological novel in disguise.  As with all of the The Sun Also Rises episodes this year, we enjoy the legendary actor William Hurt reading—in this episode, from Jake’s “I thought I had paid for everything” meditation in chapter 14, courtesy of our friends at Simon & Schuster Audio. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, read by William Hurt. Copyright © 1926 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Used with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Consider supporting One True Podcast here: https://members.hemingwaysociety.org/podcast

Join us for the second of three installments of One True Book Club ’26! In this series of episodes, we are reading the Hemingway-relevant selection, Under Fire by Henri Barbusse, the classic French WWI novel published in 1916. This episode covers chapters 10-19 of the novel. We discuss how Barbusse finds moments of unexpected humanity amidst the carnage of warfare and his subtle characterization of the platoon, including the narrator himself. We also cover his  metafictional “Swear Words” chapter, where Barbusse reflects on a Realist writer attempts to describe the indescribable. We also connect this brutal novel to Hemingway’s writing, to other modernist works, to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried… and even to The Shawshank Redemption.  We are using the Penguin Classics edition with an Introduction written by future One True Podcast guest, Professor Jay Winter.

In this episode, we welcome Julia Cooke to discuss her new book, Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World, which profiles three pioneering women journalists: Rebecca West, Emily "Mickey" Hahn, and Martha Gellhorn.  Cooke explores these writers' shared temperament and celebrates their work as a forerunner to New Journalism. Throughout our interview, we learn about Gellhorn: her life before Hemingway entered the scene (in a letter, she would describe her younger self as "starry and restless”), her short-lived relationship with Hemingway, and her later years in which she adopted a son and experienced a rather complicated motherhood. Cooke also immerses us in Gellhorn's writing, focusing on how her war journalism weaves together harrowing scenes with humanizing details and how her witnessing of Dachau toward the end of WWII was truly transformative.

One True Podcast does its part to help your summer reading lists by covering a book that is not by Hemingway, but is Hemingway-relevant: Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, the 1916 World War I novel that Frederic Henry and Count Greffi name-drop so provocatively in between sips of icy cold champagne and smoothly fluent billiards shots.  This episode covers the first nine chapters of Under Fire, where we discuss why Hemingway damned this novel with such faint praise in his Men at War anthology, how the episodic structure might remind readers of a contemporary work like The Things They Carried, the absence of instantly recognizable characters, and – controversially – whether there’s more rain in this novel or in A Farewell to Arms. One True Podcast is never one to shy away from the divisive topics. We hope you’ll join us in this summer’s long-overdue read of Under Fire. We are using the Penguin Classics edition with an Introduction written by future One True Podcast guest, Professor Jay Winter.

Live from the University of Evansville campus and the Shanklin Theatre, where Rami Malek once trod the boards…  One True Podcast welcomes Alex Vernon for an interview recorded live in front of a captive audience of students, faculty, and community members in Evansville, Indiana, as he discusses his magnificent new biography of Tim O’Brien, Peace Is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien. Vernon explains his process of how to write a true biography, O’Brien’s life and relationship to the Vietnam War, what distinguishes O’Brien’s style as a writer, the enduring power of some of his greatest work, and much more. It is a generous, penetrating Q&A session with the world’s preeminent O’Brien scholar. Vernon – who has previously joined One True Podcast for a discussion of Hemingway and War, as well as an episode devoted to “Soldier’s Home” – lends his essential perspective to this essential contemporary writer. ** Special thanks to the UE students for their insightful questions at the end, and to the wizardry of sound designer Jon Robertson for his assistance. **   Episode Bibliography Tim O’Brien works mentioned: Going After CacciatoIf I Die in a Combat ZoneIn the Lake of the WoodsThe Things They CarriedOther works mentioned: Five-volume biography of Hemingway by Michael Reynolds (The Young Hemingway, Hemingway: The Paris Years, Hemingway: The Homecoming, Hemingway: The 1930s, Hemingway: The Final Years)

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 a rotten Catholic. Listening to Larry Grimes talk about such a crucial topic in this great novel is our idea of a divine pleasure. We hope you’ll enjoy it, too! Also, in these Sun Also Rises episodes, we enjoy the legendary actor William Hurt reading from Jake’s fascinating prayer in chapter 10, courtesy of our friends at Simon & Schuster Audio. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, read by William Hurt. Copyright © 1926 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Used with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Thank you for supporting One True Podcast, from Mark and Michael (each with a hell of a Biblical name!)

Legendary scholar Jackson Bryer joins us once again, this time to discuss one controversial moment in Hemingway’s career, his vicious “poor Scott Fitzgerald” swipe in the original publication of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” We discuss the publication history of this graceless insult, what it says about Hemingway and what it says about Fitzgerald. We go on to discuss “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as a story and the ways that wealth emerges as one of Fitzgerald’s central themes. We explore the nature of the Hemingway-Fitzgerald relationship in the 1930s, Fitzgerald’s “The Rich Boy,” and other works where the very rich emerge as important characters. Join us in our romantic awe of Jackson Bryer as he guides us through this notorious moment in Hemingway’s career!

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 Hemingway satirizes Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter, examine the plot of Hemingway's novella and the characters we meet along the way, and finally discuss its legacy. At the end of the episode, enjoy Garnet Ungar's rendition of Chopin's Étude Op. 10, No. 4 (Torrent). For even more on The Torrents of Spring and its publication history, also check out our episode with Ross K. Tangedal on Hemingway in 1926.

In our third episode celebrating the centenary of The Sun Also Rises, we examine the novel’s anti-Semitic streak and the central role of its Jewish character, Robert Cohn. We welcome the scholar Jeremy Kaye of Moorpark College for a discussion about this incendiary theme, the difference between Hemingway’s anti-Semitism and his characters, Cohn’s Jewish masculinity, his function as a scapegoat, the historical inspiration for Cohn, and much more. Even those who count The Sun Also Rises as their favorite novel admit to cringing at the hateful anti-Semitic slurs uttered by the characters. Enjoy Jeremy Kaye’s spirited defense of Robert Cohn and his "main-character energy"!  As always in these Sun Also Rises episodes, we enjoy the legendary actor William Hurt reading a memorable scene featuring Cohn, courtesy of our friends at Simon & Schuster Audio. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, read by William Hurt. Copyright © 1926 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Used with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.