Hemingway (Season 1)

"Hemingway" (2021) is a three-part PBS documentary series you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, it covers six decades of Ernest Hemingway's life — from a teenage reporter at the Kansas City Star to a Nobel laureate whose stripped-down prose rewired how American fiction sounds.

Peter Coyote narrates; Jeff Daniels reads Hemingway's own writing. The series moves between his dispatches as a war correspondent in three conflicts, the four marriages, 1920s Paris and the Lost Generation, and the novels that defined him — "A Farewell to Arms," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," "The Old Man and the Sea." His son Patrick Hemingway speaks on camera alongside biographer Mary Dearborn, novelists Mario Vargas Llosa and Edna O'Brien, and a roster of scholars who spent careers on the archive.

Burns and Novick don't tidy the portrait. The alcoholism, electroconvulsive therapy at Mayo Clinic, the deepening paranoia, and the shot in Ketchum, Idaho on 2 July 1961 are all present without softening. The tagline promises "the writer revealed" — the series earns it by treating the damage and the genius as inseparable rather than sequential. Stream "Hemingway" (2021) online on iFILM.