Ernest Hemingway: the man, the myth, the legend

ERNEST HEMINGWAY was a “man’s man”. He was a battle-hardened war veteran. A bullfighting aficionado. A lion-hunter. A deep-sea fisherman. A boozer. A brawler. A seducer of women (the women served more or less the same function for his ego as the bulls, the lions and the fish). His public persona as a kind of action hero, ever seeking adventure, was evoked in his writing, with its famously “muscular” prose. Yet as “Hemingway”, a new three-part documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, shows, the macho persona was largely contrived.