Ernest Hemingway is getting the Ken Burns treatment.
In a three-part, six-hour documentary film on PBS, seasoned filmmaker Ken Burns and longtime collaborator Lynn Novick will probe the larger-than-life myth of American literary icon Ernest Hemingway.
The series, which premieres Monday, May 5 at 8pm ET on PBS, will examine Hemingway as man, myth and writer.
Burns, who is known for his exhaustive documentaries on various Americana like The Civil War, baseball and country music, is sure to lend some gravitas to the already-large Hemingway legend, while dispelling it in favor of a more nuanced take on the complicated man.
But for Burns, “Hemingway” is an opportunity to admire the writer’s unique literary gift.
In an interview, Burns told The New York Times that while Hemingway is a controversial figure, his famously sparse style is “a beautiful thing.”
“Hemingway dared to impersonate simplicity,” Burns said. “What he understood is that you could use these seemingly simple sentences, and they would be as pregnant as any long Joycean paragraph or Faulknerian sentence that goes on and on. So much was below the surface. And it requires you to go searching for meaning.”
What better accompanying piece to the PBS doc than the actual work itself. Here are some classic Ernest Hemingway books to revisit.
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Hemingway’s first novel is about American and British expats who travel from Paris to Spain for a running of the bulls. The book is based on his own experiences among The Lost Generation of the 1920s.
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Hemingway said he rewrote the ending to this novel 39 times “before I was satisfied.” The book, based on his own experiences in World War I, is about an American serving in the ambulance corps for the Italian Army.
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
This novel about a volunteer American dynamiter during the Spanish Civil War is considered one of Hemingway’s major novels. One of the book’s unique features is its extensive use of archaisms, like the English “thou” to signal the difference between the Spanish familiar “tú” and formal “usted.”
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Although several of his novels are considered 20th-century classics, it can be argued that Hemingway's greatest innovations and most accomplished examples of his famous “Iceberg Theory” occurred in short stories like “Hills Like White Elephants,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Perhaps none of Hemingway’s books are as Hemingway-esque as “The Old Man and the Sea,” a novella about an old Cuban fisherman who spends 84 days on the water trying to bring in a giant marlin on his skiff. The book earned Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
A Moveable Feast (1964)
Published three years after his death, this 1964 memoir explores Hemingway’s days in Paris living among other expats in the 1920s. The book includes scenes with major Modernist figures such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach.
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