A new PBS documentary series was released this past week. According to the website: Hemingway, a three-part, six-hour documentary film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, examines the visionary work and the turbulent life of Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest and most influential writers America has ever produced. The series interweaves his eventful biography — a life lived at the ultimately treacherous nexus of art, fame, and celebrity — with carefully selected excerpts from his iconic short stories, novels, and nonfiction. The series reveals the brilliant, ambitious, charismatic, and complicated man behind the myth and the art he created.
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and sportsman. His economic and understated style, which he termed the iceberg theory, strongly influenced 20th-century fiction. At the same time, his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.
The New York Times wrote in 1926 of Hemingway’s first novel, “No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame.” The Sun Also Rises is written in the spare, tight prose that made Hemingway famous and, according to James Nagel, “changed the nature of American writing.” In 1954, when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was for “his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”
Hemingway was like all of us — complicated. Like many authors, he created a type of public persona in which he presented himself as a super masculine larger-than-life character. But the documentary also dives into other parts of his history that run counter to this persona. It touches on some of his early childhood, when his mother would dress him and his sister the same, either as boys or girls. The documentary suggests that this experience helped foster an androgynous mind sett that helped him portray both male and female perspectives in his work. It suggests that this may have led to experimenting with gender-switching role-play with his wives and lovers.
The series also covers aspects from his early writing career, starting as a newspaper reporter for the Kansas City Star. An experience that would be short-lived but gave him the style guide he would rely on as a writer in his future short stories, novels, and journalism.
The series has three episodes.
The first “A Writer” (1899-1929)
Hemingway, yearning for adventure, volunteers for the Red Cross during World War I. He marries Hadley Richardson and moves to Paris, publishes The Sun Also Rises, and finds critical and commercial success with his second novel, A Farewell to Arms.
The second “The Avatar” (1929-1944)
Having achieved a level of fame rarely seen in the literary world, Hemingway settles in Key West with Pauline Pfeiffer but can’t stay put for long. He reports on the Spanish Civil War and begins a turbulent romance with Martha Gellhorn.
The third “The Blank Page” (1944-1961)
Hemingway follows the Army as they advance through Europe. Afterward, he tries to start a life with Mary Welsh but is dogged with tragedies. He publishes The Old Man and the Sea to acclaim but is beset by his declining mental condition.
This series has already found critical acclaim and is well worth the watch.
You can find more information on where and how to watch it on the PBS website: www.pbs.org/kenburns/hemingway/.
