A SALUTE TO AMERICA’S Literary GIANTS

Filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick dig into the life of the talented and troubled Nobel Prize–winning writer Ernest Hemingway in their latest PBS documentary series, Hemingway (April 5–7), featuring Jeff

Daniels voicing the influential author, and Meryl Streep, Keri Russell, Mary-Louise Parker and Patricia Clarkson as his wives. Inspired by the literary giant (and his pals and peers), here are fun facts and products related to some of our great American novelists.

Mark Twain outlined. John Steinbeck pretended his audience was one person. And Hemingway drank. Acknowledging the writing blocks that have stunted even the greatest minds, the solid wood Writer’s Block makes a conversation piece for fellow bibliophiles with more than 100 authors to choose from, including Twain, Steinbeck and Louisa

May Alcott. $10 each or $25 for three, literaturelodge.com If you’re nostalgic for the lost art of diagramming a sentence, check out the Sentence Diagrams of Great Literary Openers. The set of cards uses the oldschool Reed-Kellogg system to diagram the opening lines of 12 classics, including Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. $13, shop.nybooks.com Proud of your own book collection? Have artist Jane Mount illustrate your favorite classic titles in an Ideal Bookshelf Custom Print. Starting at $105, idealbookshelf.com More than 70 years of classic literature design is featured in the Postcards From Penguin Box, a collection of 100 postcards, each featuring a different book jacket. $25, penguinrandomhouse.com On Jan. 1 of this year, the copyright on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby expired and the book entered the public domain, which means we’re due for a few

adaptations and re-creations, including a miniseries for A+E Studios and Nghi Vo’s novel The Chosen and the Beautiful (Tordotcom, June 1), a magical retelling from the perspective of a queer Vietnamese American. $27, amazon.com

“The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “Up in Michigan” and “Indian Camp” are just a few of the classics in The Hemingway Stories (Scribner), released in conjunction with the PBS series and presented in chronological order. $17, amazon.com; Blu-ray or DVD of the docuseries, $40, shop.pbs.org