One True Podcast ushers in the summer by reading a book that is not by Hemingway, but is Hemingway-relevant: W.H. Hudson’s The Purple Land, the 1885 novel that Jake Barnes name-drops in The Sun Also Rises and then weaponizes to criticize Robert Cohn.

This episode covers the first 11 chapters, where we discuss the Hemingway-Hudson connection, this novel’s picaresque structure, the dramatic situation, the setting, and the various adventures that our hero experiences, including the problematic nature of his “intensely amorous” inclinations.

We hope you’ll join us in this slow read of The Purple Land. We are using the handsome University of Wisconsin Press edition with an Introduction written by former One True Podcast guest, our friend Ilan Stavans.

Thank you as always for your support of One True Podcast!

One True Podcast again toasts to the centenary of Hemingway’s In Our Time by examining “Cat in the Rain,” one of its so-called “marriage tales.”

We welcome John Beall to discuss the story’s setting, its composition, the dynamic of the marriage, its autobiographical inspiration, and how this story fits in to Hemingway’s other “frosty” marriages. We explore the symbolism of the cat, the omnipresence of the rain, repetition in the story… and we even wonder: what the heck is that guy reading that’s so interesting?

John Beall – author of the new book Hemingway’s Art of Revision: The Making of the Short Fiction – expertly guides us through the ambiguities of this tense, elliptical story. Thanks for listening!

“Who Murdered the Vets?” is one of the most important non-fiction pieces Hemingway ever wrote. This 1935 article for New Masses excoriated the Roosevelt administration’s careless supervision of World War I veterans who died during the Labor Day hurricane while they were living in workcamps along the Keys. Stationed there to help to build the overseas highway, more than 250 died as victims of the cataclysmic storm.

Hemingway wrote what he called his “2800 words of dynamite” in a frothing rage, furious at the irresponsibility of the government, shocked at what he had witnessed firsthand, and grieving for the veterans who survived the Great War, only to lose their lives at home.

To discuss this explosive article and its crucial context, we welcome James H. Meredith, the former President of the Hemingway Society. Jim’s perspective walks us through Hemingway’s approach to this tragedy and how he composed such a vivid, emotional polemic.