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!