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"Hemingway" (2021 release; 3 episodes of about 115 min. Each) is a new documentary about Ernest Hemingway. As Episode 1 "The Writer (1899-1928)" opens, we get some introductory remarks of various experts and talking heads. As writer Michael Katakis puts it: "Despite all of his flaws, he seems to understand humans." Someone else puts it more succinct: "I hate Hemingway the myth, as it obscures Hemingway the man." We then go back in time, to the early years of Hemingway's upbringing in Oak Park, a comfortable Chicago suburb, with his 5 siblings and his parents. At this point we are 10 min. Into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this is the latest project from Ken Burns, co-directed by Burns and his longtime collaborator Lynn Novick. Here they tackle the man, the myth that is Ernest Hemingway. Despite his notoriety and reputation, I must admit I knew virtually nothing of his life, let alone much of his work. To say that Hemingway had an interesting life would be the understatement of the year. There are 3 episodes in this series. Besides the afore-mentioned Episode 1, there is also EP 2 "The Avatar (1928-1944)" and EP 3 "The Blank Page (1944-1961)". If Episode 1 is an indication of what is yet to come (and why wouldn't it), the film makers have meticulously researched Hemingway in order to present to us who he really was, going beyond the myth, the legend. The fascinating part of Episode 1 is that Hemingway struggled, and struggled long, to become a respected and eventually successful writer. Basically an "overnight success that was years in the making". The amount of (B&W) pictures and even some archive footage that Burns and Novick were able to dig up is impressive. Bottom line, this is a thoroughly insightful, educational and yes, entertaining reassessment of the life and times of Ernest Hemingway, and I can't wait to check out the remaining two episodes.

"Hemingway" premiered this week on PBS and is now available on PBS On Demand, Amazon Instant Video, and other streaming services. If you have any interest in Ernest Hemingway (even if you don't really know much about him--as was for case for me), or are simply a fan of Ken Burns, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

UPDATE 4/10/21 I've now seen the other 2 episodes, and they only confirm all of the good that appeared in the first episodes. All around a terrific documentary series.

I enjoyed this documentary; as I do most all documentaries done by Mr. Burns and unlike so many other reviewers, I am a fan of Hemingway's writing; a millenial fan at that. And in the spirit of Hemingway, I'll keep this review short and to the point.

The main focus of this six hour affair was Hemingway's relationships; especially with regards to the women in his life. I found this choice interesting, and insightful. The only downside to said choice, is that other parts of his life were glossed over; parts I find exceedingly engrossing; i.e. His literary beefs (Faulkner immediately comes to mind) and the friendships he formed in Paris with his fellow artists. Despite me knowing quite a bit about most of his contemporaries in Paris, a little backstory about each would've been an welcomed addition. These are my only real complaints about the documentary. Here's to hoping an equally good Faulkner or Wolfe documentary is in the works.

This was broadcast this week in 2-hour time slots on three consecutive nights on PBS. It is very well done and I can't imagine anyone watching it and NOT learning a lot new about the man. His life certainly was not one of a role model and perhaps his many, many faults, both personal and interpersonal, were a necessary part of developing the writing style that made him indelibly famous.

Perhaps even less well known are Hemingway's four rules for writing well:

USE SHORT SENTENCES.

USE SHORT FIRST PARAGRAPHS.

USE VIGOROUS ENGLISH.

BE POSITIVE, NOT NEGATIVE.

Back in my working days I took a course on effective writing, the essence was the same. I would add "use active voice, not passive voice" when you can.

If you are going to judge any writer or artist since a moral standard, a contemporary politically correct moral standard, you can rid off almost all the great art of the past because if you are looking for saints, people who love cats and feed birds, that people could be your type of friendly person of today, but they never will produce a piece of art, you are looking on the wrong part of humanity.

What make great Hemingway is not he was a admirer of bull fights, like millions of others. Was not he hunt animals like millions of others. Was not he use rifles and guns, like millions of others. Was not he get drunk every single day of his life like millions of others. He could be one piece of crap like million of others. But he created some of the most fascinating and important books from the last century, on any language. He could be like your sorry and politically correct and double standard ass of today, but he wasn't. He could have a farm with beautiful little animals. Nobody cares for someone like that, unless he finally write something absolutely marvelous, like all the great books he wrote. If you like animal care, you can retire to a farm and watch over piggies, cows, bulls, chickens and worms, and wait for someone film a biopic about you.

But Hemingway wrote some of the most important and memorable books of the past century on any language. Some of those books are brutal, because he live a brutal life, someone who ends by took his own life the way he lives. Millions of people has done that, too. But if you write The Oldman and the Fish, A farewell to arms, From whom the belss tolls, Death in the afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and win the Nobel Prize, man that's a life worth to live and worth to be told and retold.

I'm not American, but Mexican, but Hemingway is one of the most important writers not only from the US, but from the entire world. If that doesn't ring a bell, Moralists, you can go away to Gilligan's island. This is a biopic of an absolute admirable man, who could be like millions of others, like I just have said. Instead, he left a literary corpus that still is one of the American true treasures of their literary history, someone that can make you feel proud to be part of his nation, proud as human being, and also proud of reading him and find someone extraordinary, and not a poor drunk failure who liked to kiss cows and chickens in a remote farm.

If you like that, be my guest. But before that, please, read his books and if you doesn't end admiring his intelectual stature and his brilliance as a writer, then you don't know to read, and you deserve to live in the Fantasy island. This biopic is a masterpiece, well worth for the men who inspired it.

This is a supherb telling of a biography of Hemingway and done in the inimitable style of Ken Burns. It is well paced and presented in such a way that every minute of the 4 1/2 hours or so of the documentary is relevant, except for the talking heads.

Most of the talking heads had nothing to say that was not their opinions, and very often the opinions of people that did not know the person are essentially worthless. To see how a very good documentary can be made without a single talking head, one only need to watch the Apollo 11 documentary film!

If it wasn't for the talking heads I would have given this a 10. Lastly, why does pbs insist on inserting their promos mid screen every 15 or so minutes? It can only be to disrupt the viewers experience, it can have no other purpose!

This is an excellent bio of an iconic figure in American literature. However, the choice of Jeff Daniels to voice Hemingway as he read excerpts from his novels and short stories left me scratching my head and turning on the mute feature. His reading was monotonous and one-note with absolutely no voice inflection whatsoever. The bio's narrator Peter Coyote would have been much more effective, or Liev Schreiber or Adrien Brody, for example, who all have rich, masculine voices. If you could get past Daniel's bland reading, Hemingway's life history done by Ken Burns was well done, informative, and enlightening.

Pretty good documentary about a truly fascinating man, with an incredibly interesting and adventurous life. To its great credit, it comes with no agenda other than being an objective and informative covering of Hemingway's life from beginning to end. Provides a picture of his flaws, such as tendencies toward meanness and jealousy - no doubt due to insecurities. And also his intelligence, wisdom, courage, and incredible vitality. By all accounts he was one of those singular people who'd completely dominate any room they're in just by his presence. Will certainly feel there was a lot more to Hemingway than is in this documentary, but there's only so much you can cover in 6 hours, and everything that was in a life such as Hemingway's makes it particularly challenging. Particularly grateful for the information provided in better understanding his suicide, specifically his numerous head injuries, continuous drinking, and family history of depression. Was like the "hat trick" combination of suicide causes, your left with compassion on how he must have felt.

A very good and thorough survey of Hemingway's life.

A complex person who brought simplicity to writing.

This is the life of passionate and complex man. Here the documentary is very much one of an outsider looking in, like walking through an old museum and seeing lots of memorabilia in glass cases.

The format seems cookie cutter - a Burns documentary and flat narration where the subject of the day could be anything.

It shows what, but never really understands why.

Obviously there has been much effort in to collecting material. But, we are presented with a dry collage of events.

He died before I was 10, and I've never read any of his books, though I've seen the movie adaptations. Heard all my life of his machismo and the suspected underlying homosexuality.

This documentary filled in a lot of the gaps - how he gained his reputation, abused his wives and children (basically everyone in his orbit), his genius for - and perseverance in - writing; his obvious late-life mental illness.

I felt this was well done but two hours too long. I really could have done without the pedantic gasbags giving their overanalytical and pretentious views on his work. The man was a jerk. The nasty letter his son wrote him is better than anything he wrote himself.

I really wanted to engage with this series. But by the end of the first segment it was getting on my nerves. I have become accustomed to seeing documentary work drawn-out to tedious lengths in this era on Netflix and Hulu. But it was obvious that Hemingway was being treated with, if not kid gloves, the usual high degree of reverence found in the thousands of other bios of him.

I was disappointed with this Burns documentary and could not finish it. I am not an avid Hemingway reader and didn't enter with particular feelings or expectations. Your mileage might vary.

Despite the 6-hour running time, this documentary skips along the surface of Hemingway's life like a piece of flint.

Great writer? Yes. Great man? No. Hemingway was a narcissist, a liar, a brute, a womanizer, and a blowhard.

Hemingway basically lived off his wives and lost the friendship of everyone he ever knew. And while this documentary skips along with fleeting mentions of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc., it totally neglects an important Paris connection: Robert McAlmon.

It was McAlmon who published Hemingway's first book: "Three Stories and Ten Poems" thru his Contact Publishing. It was McAlmon who accompanied and paid for Hemingway's first trip to Spain to watch the bull fights. And it was McAlmon who was among the first people Hemingway turned on after his success with "The Sun Also Rises."

The novel's character Robert Loeb is based on Harold Loeb and also McAlmon. Hemingway turned on McAlmon and called him a gossip after he learned that McAlmon was "telling tales" about his his sexual proclivities and punched him out in a bar screaming. "Now tell that to your goddamned friends!"

McAlmon later got revenge in his memoir "Being Geniuses Together," and their relationship was further examined in "Letters from Oblivion," a novel by Edward Lorusso.

Great writer, yes. But Hemingway was one nasty piece of work!

I not only thoroughly enjoyed this.... I wanted more! Only 3 episodes...

A, probably, too comprehensive, documentary on the man, myth, legend. I think it effectively demystifies him and charts an entire life quite well. I can't say all of it was interesting, as a casual enjoyer of his works, not particularly finding his works incredible, but it's interesting to see the literary world at the time and how his life informed his work.

Like most series like this, I think your initial interest in the subject will help inform if you'll like the program. It doesn't mean you won't be interested, because he is an interesting, complicated person. Actually, the most interesting aspect was his queerness being examined somewhat, and how unfortunate it was that the understanding of queerness was so antiquated.

I guess it is appropriate to gather together all the Hemingway footage, photos, and writing for posterity's sake, but the whole thing was hard to endure because of Hemingway being such an unlikeable man. The only book of his I've read is "The old man and the sea", and I didn't get what all the fuss was about, it was OK, but I expected something epic from such an esteemed author, maybe just not my cup of tea, and that's also why I didn't enjoy the documentary?

Ernest Hemingway is known, as a writer, for his terse, muscular prose; but also for a life in which he seemed to be trying to play act the man who (in his his own imagination) should properly have written his books. Hemongway drank, womanized, hunted, fished and fought; and sadly burnt himself out, committing suicide whilst struggling with his mental health at the age of only sixty-one. Burns and Novak's documentary doesn't make him out to be a monster, exactly; but one does get the sense of someone who grew over-accustomed to being the main act in their own life. There's a faint air of reverent tragedy to this series; but perhaps that comes from its own subject, who was always measuring himself against greatness, and at the same time, for death.

It doesnt help that I never rated "Ernesto" personally or as a writer, (and I used to read everybody and then some). I liked Death in the Afternoon, but thats about it.

Hemingway should have stayed a journalist, he was very good at it.

If Kenny Burns cant parse the person and writings, from the tawd and gossip then he should stop these garish documentaries. I want to know what drove these people, Burns ignores those questions.

How about other much more deserving American writers like Ray Carver, or. Edna St Vincent Millay. Or Steinbeck or Arthur Miller.

Hemingway was all publicist, tabloid , and 3rd rate studied grandiosity.

Ken Burns has done so much wonderful stuff that I think we may be reluctant to be as hard on this biography as it deserves.

The uncompromising voice of Peter Coyote drills Hemingway down year-by-year Without sympathy, without forgiveness, and almost without wonder at the artistic achievements of this man's life.

There are things to be learned from it, and there are some amazing moments in it, but I wonder if Mr. Burns, once he had his hands fully around the character he was about to portray had any misgivings about the portrayal he would make.

Halfway through the last hour I had to turn it off. Hemmingway could be a real jerk, but if the only thing he had ever written was the old man and the sea, then we should not be so quick to judgment.

This series glosses over Hemingway as writer or a person with any real depth or feelings. It uses all the usual Ken Burns visual cliches, especially snapshots of EH looking straight-on at the camera. I lost count of how many there were just in the first episode. I've read many books by and on EH and feel very close to him on many levels. His childhood and his time in Paris are so superficially glossed over, it's unbelievable. Picasso was a painter so here's one of his paintings. Here's Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in their interesting salon. Here's some nice Satie music on the soundtrack for atmosphere. Here's a picture of Ezra Pound and another of James Joyce. Surely you've heard of them. Never mind what they all saw in EH's writing. You want to know something about Sherwood Anderson? Well, you can look him up on Wikipedia. Mostly we want to talk about EH's legend, especially his relationships with women.

Ken Burns, you are the Thomas Kincade of TV documentaries.

Like some of Ken's other documentaries this one fell back on his tried & true style of "quaint" period music in the background whilst listening to some blowhard ramble on. It worked for the 1990s-era Civil War so why not keep going back to that well eh? This time around the documentary ferris wheel we have some people so smug - so far up their own backsides it makes me wonder how they can even breathe. It's all just so bloody tired.

Long story short: Watching with mute ON + subtitles is the way to go if you care to subject yourself to Ken Burns Hemingway's documentary.