One True Podcast

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.