Not the Man You Thought You Knew

A six-hour documentary on Ernest Hemingway measures one of the most famous authors of the 20th century against the standards of the 21st By Brin Jonathan Butler

- Brin Jonathan Butler

Truman Capote once described Ernest Hemingway as a “closet everything.” In the first 15 minutes of Hemingway, his first wife, Hadley Richardson, provides a more nuanced take on the dynamic Capote identified: “There were so many sides to him,” she’s quoted as saying, “that he defied geometry.”

Since Hemingway’s death nearly six decades ago, his absence from the world stage has lasted almost as long as the controversial life that he lived. The forthcoming six-hour, three-part reappraisal from the Emmy Award-winning duo Ken Burns and Lynn Novick—who’ve produced acclaimed documentaries together about the Vietnam War, baseball, jazz, and Prohibition— persuasively challenges the stereotypes of toxic masculinity that have evolved around this most divisive of literary figures. It begins airing April 5 on PBS.

“Too often films are an execution of an already-arrived-at end,” Burns says. “That’s not the way we work. We understand that the first thing we do is check our baggage at the door and just go in and be reeducated.”

To separate man from myth, Novick and Burns took advantage of unprecedented access to Hemingway’s original manuscripts, correspondence, and scrapbooks. They also had a well of archival footage shot throughout his adult life from around the world and at the Finca La Vigía, his 20-year home in Cuba.