hemingway

How did one of history's greatest writers — Ernest Hemingway — get going with his craft, develop his indelible style, and infuse his narratives with memorable life and compelling tension?

Today we delve into the answers to those questions with Hemingway scholar Mark Cirino, who is a professor of English, the editor and author of half a dozen books on Hemingway — including Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action — and the host of the One True Podcast which covers all things related to Papa. Mark and I our begin our conversation with how Hemingway cut his teeth with writing as a journalist, how the "iceberg theory" underlay his approach to writing as a novelist, and how his years in Paris — and the books, people, and art he encountered there — influenced his work and the trajectory of his career. We then discuss how his travel and recreational pastimes allowed him to write with a vivid firsthand understanding of certain places and pursuits, what his writing routine was like, and how the characters in his novels explore the tension between thought and action. We end our conversation with Mark's recommendation for where to start reading Hemingway if you've never read him or haven't read him in a long time, and what Mark thinks was Hemingway's "one true sentence."

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Hemingway works mentioned in the show:
  • "Big Two-Hearted River"
  • "Soldier's Home"
  • "Hills Like White Elephants"
  • "Killers"
  • "Indian Camp"
  • "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
  • In Our Time
  • Death in the Afternoon
  • A Moveable Feast
  • The Sun Also Rises
  • Across the River and Into the Trees
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls
  • The Old Man and the Sea
  • A Farewell to Arms
  • Men at War (edited by Hemingway)
• Shakespeare and Company lending cards for Hemingway
• Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker
• Hemingway's Brain by Andrew Farah
• AoM Article: Why Ernest Hemingway Committed Suicide
• AoM Article: The Libraries of Famous Men — Ernest Hemingway
• AoM Article: Ernest Hemingway as a Case Study in Living a T-Shaped Life

Connect With Mark Cirino

• One True Podcast
• One True Podcast on Twitter

Last summer, I had Lesley Blume on the show to talk about her book "Everybody Behaves Badly" which gives the story behind the story of Hemingway’s first big novel, "The Sun Also Rises." On today’s show, I talk to an author of another book about this landmark novel, who, instead of providing the historical context of "The Sun Also Rises," explores the ideal of manliness Hemingway was trying to get at in the book. His name is Frank Miniter, he’s a journalist and the author of previous books like "The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide." His latest is called "This Will Make a Man of You: One Man’s Search to Find What Makes Men."
Frank and I discuss Hemingway’s project of creating a new myth of manliness that combined traditional notions of masculinity with modern sensibilities, how Frank Sinatra killed the rugged gentleman and made “cool” a defining feature of modern manliness, and what the running of the bulls can teach us about rites of passage into manhood. We end our conversation talking about Hemingway’s attraction to and repulsion from bullfighting, and why the matador was Hemingway’s ideal symbol of manliness.

Welcome back to another episode of the Art of Manliness podcast. In this week's episode we talk to Silvio Calabi, co-author of the book Hemingway's Guns. We discuss Ernest Hemingway's favorite firearms, how his love of guns influenced his writing, and what his favorite hunts were.