The Lost Suitcase

One True Podcast

For our 100th episode, One True Podcast investigates the legend of the lost manuscripts!

In December 1922, Hemingway’s first wife Hadley, misplaced a suitcase filled with the young Hemingway’s unpublished writing. Since then, this episode has invited intense speculation: Was this early work stolen? Did it end up in the garbage? Did Hadley subconsciously want the work to be stolen?
In order to explore the unknowable, we turn to four novelists who each use this mysterious episode as the inspiration for a novel. Join us as Sherry Harris (The Gun Also Rises, 2019), David Berens (The Hemingway Code, 2022), Diane Gilbert Madsen (Hunting for Hemingway, 2010), and Dennis McDougal (Hemingway’s Suitcase, 2017) talk about how the manuscripts inspired their own fiction, what they think happened to the suitcase, how Hadley might have felt, and the challenge of writing about Hemingway.
We also discuss one of our “one true sentences” that describes how Hemingway felt “in the night” after confirming that all of his work was gone.
Enjoy this episode and all of its speculation! And thank you for supporting One True Podcast over the first one hundred episodes!