Watch Famous American Authors

The irresistible life story of the author who gave the world Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Follows Mark Twain's odyssey from steamboat pilot to miner to failed inventor to acclaimed lecturer.

Ernest Hemingway swore that he never wanted his biography published until at least 100 years after his death. Respectfully defying his wishes, BIOGRAPHY brings Ernest Hemingway to viewers to in a special Biography on the man often quoted as the most important writer of the English language since Shakespeare. Narrated by Mariel Hemingway, "Ernest Hemingway: Wrestling With Life" searches to discover the man behind the infamous myth. Using interviews from his sons Jack and Gregory, his best friend AE Hotchner, and Gregorio Fuentes - Hemingway's model for the "The Old Man and the Sea," BIOGRAPHY explores the life of Hemingway through those who loved and knew him best. With insights from Charles Scribner III, fellow African-hunter Clara Spiegel, and Gianfranco Ivanich - brother of an older Hemingway's teenage-obsession, BIOGRAPHY brings life to the troubled writer as no program has done before. Shot on location at the landmarks of his life, BIOGRAPHY takes viewers on a trip through Hemingway's world. The program revisits his past in Italy, where the nineteen-year old ambulance driver was gravely wounded in WWI, only to find his first love in a hospital in Milan. On the streets of bohemian Paris of the 1920s, BIOGRAPHY shows a struggling Hemingway whose legendary friendships and fallouts included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. In Spain, viewers see where Hemingway made famous the running of the bulls, and in Africa, a refuge for big-game hunting that tested Hemingway's own "grace under pressure." With Key West and Cuba comes "Papa," the master fisherman who succumbs to the fortunes and curses of fame, and in Sun Valley, Idaho, a violent end among a rugged paradise.

Edgar Allan Poe. He's the all time master of the macabre, famed for such literary classics as "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Raven." But the story of his life was more bizarre than the tales he told. For Poe was a man greatly blessed and supremely cursed: blessed with immortal genius; cursed by a life of lost loves and shattered hopes.