Hemingway, 3: The Blank Page (1944 - 61) followed by talkback: Mary Karr, Rose Styron & others

Hemingway follows the Army as they advance through Europe. Afterwards, he tries to start a life with Mary Welsh, but is beset with tragedies. He publishes The Old Man and the Sea to acclaim but is overcome by his declining mental condition.

Hemingway, a three-part, six-hour documentary film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, examines the visionary work and the turbulent life of Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest and most influential writers America has ever produced. Interweaving his eventful biography — a life lived at the ultimately treacherous nexus of art, fame, and celebrity — with carefully selected excerpts from his iconic short stories, novels, and non-fiction, the series reveals the brilliant, ambitious, charismatic, and complicated man behind the myth, and the art he created.

The panel will be begin around 8:00PM EST, with Zoom opening just before that. 

LitFilm 2021 will be presenting part one on May 4 at 7 PM and part two on May 5 at 7 PM.

The film will be introduced by Lynn Novick. Lynn Novick has been directing and producing landmark documentary films about American life and culture, history, politics, sports, art, architecture, literature, and music for more than 30 years. Her 4 part series, College Behind Bars, aired on PBS in 2019. The 80 hours of acclaimed PBS programming she has created in collaboration with Ken Burns include The Vietnam War, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright, The War, and Prohibition – these landmark series have garnered 19 Emmy nominations. One of the most respected documentary filmmakers and story tellers in America, Novick herself has received Emmy, Peabody and Alfred I. duPont Columbia Awards.

And the film will be followed by a Second Read discussion of Hemingway, the canon, and the documentary with Rose Styron, Mary Karr, Elaine Showalter, Michelle Stephenson, and Adrienne Westenfeld 

Mary Karr is an award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed and New York Times best-selling memoirs The Liars' Club, Cherry, and Lit, as well as the Art of Memoir, and five poetry collections, most recently Tropic of Squalor. Karr is also a songwriter, having collaborated with Rodney Crowell, Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams and others on a country album called KIN. ​A sought after speaker, she has given distinguished talks at prestigious universities, libraries, and writers' festivals across the world. Karr welcomes conversation with her audience and she is known for her spirited, lively, and engaging Q&A sessions. Her many awards include The Whiting Writer's Award, an NEA, a Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and a Guggenheim. She is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry magazine. Karr is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University and she lives in New York City. 

Since retiring in 2003, Elaine Showalter has been dividing her time between Washington, D.C. and London, where she was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society Of Literature.  In 2012, she also received an honorary degree from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland(link is external), and won  the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet  to Annie Proulx. She also attended her fiftieth class reunion at Bryn Mawr and spoke at the Colony Club  in New York with Joyce Carol Oates. Elaine is currently working on a biography of Julia Ward Howe to be published by Simon & Schuster.

As co-founding member of the Rada Film Group, filmmaker, artist and author, Michèle Stephenson pulls from her Panamanian and Haitian roots and international experience as a human rights attorney to tell compelling deeply personal stories in a variety of media that resonate beyond the margins. Her work has appeared on a variety of broadcast and web platforms, including PBS, Showtime and MTV. Her most recent film, American Promise, was nominated for three Emmys including Best Documentary and Best News Coverage of a Contemporary Issue. The film also won the Jury Prize at Sundance, and was selected for the New York Film Festivals’ Main Slate Program. Stephenson was recently awarded the Chicken & Egg Pictures Filmmaker Breakthrough Award and is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. Her current work, Hispaniola, is supported by the likes of the National Film Board of Canada, the MacArthur Foundation, Telefilm Canada, the Ford Foundation and the Sundance Documentary Fund. Her community engagement accomplishments include the PUMA BritDoc Impact Award for a Film with the Greatest Impact on Society, a Revere Award Nomination from the American Publishers Association, and she is a fellow of Skoll Storytellers of Change. Promises Kept, written along with co-authors Joe Brewster and Hilary Beard, won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work.

Rose Styron is a poet, journalist and human rights activist. She has authored three collections of poetry, and collaborated on translations from Russian. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. She has contributed chapters to books on depression, and articles on human rights or literature to the New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review. Voice of America produced Writer’s World, her international series of conversations with publicly-engaged novelists and poets. A founding member of Amnesty International USA, she headed its National Advisory Council. Styron also sat on the boards of PEN, the RFK Human Rights Award, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch and Beyond Conflict. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she currently serves on the board of the Academy of American Poets, The Paris Review, and the Association to Benefit Children. In 2009 and 2010, Styron was a Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School Institute of Politics and The Carr Center. She is working on a memoir, which is forthcoming from Knopf. She resides on Martha’s Vineyard.

Adrienne Westenfeld is an editor at Esquire, where she writes about books and culture, commissions and edits fiction, and curates the Esquire Book Club. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Town & Country, and Elle, among other places.