How to Watch Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's Hemingway

A new six-hour documentary series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick explores the visionary work and turbulent life of American writer Ernest Hemingway. It weaves together his biography with extracts from his novels and short stories.

The program penetrates the myth of Hemingway to reveal a deeply troubled and ultimately tragic figure. The film is an excellent choice for new and existing Hemingway fans alike.

How to Watch

Ken Burns' new PBS documentary on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant literary biography that will make you think about your own life and writing. Whether you're a Hemingway fan or not, this sweeping, six-hour series is worth watching.

The PBS documentary "Hemingway" explores the complicated personal and literary life of the famous American writer, who was a Nobel Prize winner and considered to be one of the best writers in the world. The documentary spans his entire life, starting with his childhood in Chicago and ending with his suicide at age 61.

It's an engrossing, well-crafted film that combines interviews with dozens of people from his life. The documentary also includes a wide array of Hemingway's own writing, including his most famous works such as A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea.

Despite his fame, Hemingway was an embittered figure. He railed against the idea of an idealized male role and was not always above class-informed racism. He also didn't shy away from physical trauma, battling alcohol and depression throughout his life.

As is typical of Burns' documentaries, Hemingway is full of fascinating, sometimes-controversial details about Hemingway's life. This documentary doesn't try to hide those details and is unsparing in its depiction of both Hemingway's kindness and cruelty toward his wives, lovers, children and friends.

In this three-part series, Burns and his collaborator Lynn Novick weave together a close study of the author's life. Hemingway's relationships are vividly brought to life through letters he sent to and from his four wives, as well as his friends and family.

Hemingway's relationships were complex and tumultuous, as is his writing. Hemingway's friendships with John Steinbeck and William Faulkner enriched his career, while his marriage to Martha Stewart caused him heartache. Hemingway's relationship with his son, Patrick, was also strained, and he had to battle alcohol addictions.

After Hemingway split with Martha, he joined the army as it fought through Europe in World War I. He went on to write about his experience, but the war took its toll and eventually led him to his death.

Episode 1: A Writer

As far as documentaries go, Hemingway is one of the more interesting subjects Ken Burns has covered. His other two successful documentaries, The Vietnam War and Prohibition, have helped put him on the map as an important documentarian, but Hemingway was more of a hard target to reach, and so he took his time with his latest series.

In this new documentary, directed by Burns and co-directed by Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, Hemingway is examined from a number of different angles to reveal the writer's full story. Hemingway is considered to be a great American writer, and his work has impacted literature in the world for over a century. But his life was filled with controversy and turmoil, and this documentary will help you get a better understanding of why he became so influential.

It doesn't shy away from the narcissistic, jealous and abusive side of Hemingway, but it also doesn't gloss over these problems. The man could be cruel to his children, and verbally abused his wives. He even rehearsed suicide for his closest friends at parties.

Hemingway's machismo, big-game hunting and womenizing is well covered in the series, but he was much more than these things, as Burns and Novick point out. He also was a master of language, and the series explores how his unique style of writing influenced generations of writers around the world.

The film also takes a look at Hemingway's gender, pointing out that while he was often seen as the male, there was a lot of fluidity in his writing. For instance, he used feminine language in some of his stories, including "Up in Michigan" and "Hills Like White Elephants," and he wrote about a number of different women throughout his career.

During this time, he was married to four different women and had a string of flings with women he met while on the war front in France and Africa. He also had a number of relationships with women in the Cuban military, and he was deeply devoted to his nurse, whom he would marry later in his life.

Episode 2: The Avatar

The series, based on the comic book of the same name, is set in a world that is divided into four nations, each ruled by a Fire Lord, and where people are capable of telekinetically manipulating one of the elements (water, earth, fire or air) through practices called “bending.” The Avatar is the only one who can master all four bending arts, and they’re responsible for maintaining balance between the world’s elements.

The first episode is devoted to the life of Hemingway and explores his career as a writer from his childhood in the suburbs to his early days in journalism and his time on Red Cross duty during WWII. It’s an incredibly revealing and thoughtful documentary that delves into his literary reputation, his sexual experimentation, and his mental illness in the years leading up to his death at 61.

Hemingway was a renowned author who earned tremendous respect from writers like Tim O’Brien and Abraham Verghese, but he also had his faults. In this docuseries, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick look at the writer from multiple angles and attempt to understand why he was such an important and influential figure in American culture.

As a result, Burns and Novick approach the series with a great deal of tenderness and sensitivity. They’re keen to examine the complexities of Hemingway’s personality and how it affected his work, and they also use expert interviews with literary scholars to explore the impact of his writing on contemporary society.

In this episode, we hear from a number of people who knew Hemingway personally, including his wives and friends. They read letters that Hemingway wrote, and they talk about the relationship between Hemingway and his family. They explain how Hemingway’s mental illness was a major part of his life and how it influenced his writing.

It’s fascinating to hear about how Hemingway’s mental illness affected his work and how it also shaped his relationship with his wives and other people in his life. It’s also interesting to see how his physical injuries impacted his mental health.

The episode is a little long, but it’s worth it. The characters and their relationships are explored with great detail, and the overall story is well-rounded and intriguing.

Episode 3: The Blank Page

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s three-part series of Hemingway is a must-see for all literature lovers. It is a fascinating look at the author from birth in 1899 through his death in 1961.

As is always the case with these Burns documentaries, Hemingway’s life is a complex one, and he was a man of many facets. And yet, this documentary eschews romanticizing any single aspect of Hemingway’s life or work.

The wartime experiences that inspired A Farewell to Arms, for example, are illuminatingly examined here. We hear from a number of people who were there at the time, including Edna O’Brien, who notes that Hemingway was a rule-breaking writer in his twenties.

This episode also examines Hemingway’s relationship to women, and it does so in a thoughtful and nuanced way. Among the things we learn are how Hemingway subverted the career of his third wife, Martha Gellhorn; how Hemingway married a 17-year-old Kenyan girl while on safari in Africa with his fourth wife Mary Welsh; and how Hemingway’s son Gregory was picked up at an airport for wearing women’s clothing (he would later transition to male).

There are a few harrowing moments in this episode that I will never forget. Hemingway’s inability to handle Gregory’s gender fluidity-themed book is the most jarring. Hemingway was obsessed with this topic, but he was too afraid of being humiliated to accept that his son had a life and identity other than a boy.

It is a tragic turn for Hemingway, and Burns and Novick do a remarkable job of capturing the nuance. They don’t shy away from the fact that he was a troubled soul, whose self-image was in shambles.

His idiosyncratic behavior, which led to a tumultuous marriage to his first wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, is woven into the plot as well. It is also interesting to hear from his therapist, who explains that Hemingway was a victim of sex shame and that his alcoholism was the reason he became so depressed.

In this final part, we get a closer look at Hemingway’s writing process, with some illuminating pieces of handwritten manuscript. This is a very different film from the other two in this series, and it’s definitely worth watching for its insights.