One True Podcast begins this year’s occasional commemoration of In Our Time’s 100th anniversary with a show devoted to one of its highlights. To discuss Hemingway’s classic story “Soldier’s Home,” we invite the author of Soldiers Once and Still, Alex Vernon.

We discuss Harold Krebs and his war experience on the Western Front of World War I, his painful reentry into his former life, and his strained relationship with his mother. We also examine the extraordinary language Hemingway uses to capture Krebs's tortured consciousness and explore this story’s placement among Hemingway’s career of chronicling men at war. As the author of the first literary biography of Tim O’Brien, Alex describes Krebs’s frustration at the difficulty of telling his own true war stories and compares it with the same idea in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

On this, our 150th episode of One True Podcast, join us for a conversation about an essential Hemingway short story. Thank you for listening, rating the program, and spreading the word!

Seventy-five years ago, Lillian Ross published “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” in The New Yorker, her longform profile of Hemingway’s 1950 visit to New York City. Ross spent time with Hemingway as he shopped for a coat, visited with Marlene Dietrich, took his son Patrick to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, met with Charles Scribner, and talked enthusiastically about his forthcoming novel, Across the River and into the Trees.

This profile has been polarizing since its publication: Did Ross deliver a subtle takedown? Did Hemingway embarrass himself with his odd mannerisms? Should Hemingway never have agreed to it? Should The New Yorker never have published it? Is this, ultimately, the most intimate and penetrating portrait of the later Hemingway ever written?

To explore this iconic profile and the journalist who wrote it, we welcome Susan Morrison, who serves as Lillian Ross’s literary executor. Morrison is the Articles Editor at The New Yorker and the author of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.

We hope you enjoy this episode and always remember: “what you win in Boston, you lose in Chicago!”

What was Ernest Hemingway doing in 1925? Where was he? What were his important relationships? What were his challenges? What was he writing?

1925 is the year that put Hemingway on the map. To guide us through this crucial year, we welcome back J. Gerald Kennedy, author of Imagining Paris, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of In Our Time, and co-editor of what will become the final volume of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. In this episode, we discuss the publication of In Our Time and the events that would inspire The Sun Also Rises; Hemingway's competitive streak and network of famous friends and rivals; the painting he bought and the influence of modern art on his writing; and much more.

We hope you enjoy one of our favorite traditions, spending our first show of the new year by going back one hundred years to explore Hemingway’s life, work, and world. Happy New Year!