The Old Man and the Sea

The story had been waiting sixteen years. In a 1936 Esquire piece about fishing the Gulf Stream, Hemingway mentioned an old Cuban commercial fisherman towed far out to sea by a giant marlin — a paragraph he knew was a book and refused to spend. He finally wrote it in Cuba in the winter of 1950–51, in eight weeks, out of the skiff world of Cojímar he had fished for two decades with his own captain, Gregorio Fuentes, and out of a career badly in need of rescue: his previous novel had been the worst-reviewed of his life.

Publication was an event with no modern equivalent. Life magazine printed the entire novel in its September 1, 1952 issue and sold more than five million copies in two days; the Scribner edition and the Book-of-the-Month Club printing were queued behind it. Readers who had written Hemingway off as a self-parody found eighty-some pages with no wasted motion — an old man, a fish, and the sea, told with the iceberg fully submerged.

The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway also won the Nobel Prize in 1954, and the committee who awarded him named this book specifically as the reason they chose him. The Old Man and the Sea was the last major work he published in his lifetime. Critics had called him finished after his previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees, had been the worst-reviewed book of his career. This book changed their minds, and made the literary world recognize that Hemingway still had the power to charm and captivate an audience.

Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish — so long that the parents of Manolin, the boy who loves him and once fished beside him, have ordered their son onto a luckier boat. The old man lives alone in a shack, talks baseball — the great DiMaggio, who plays through pain — and refuses pity. Before dawn on the eighty-fifth day he rows his skiff far beyond the other boats, out into the deep Gulf Stream.

There he hooks an enormous marlin, the fish of a lifetime, and the fish simply keeps swimming — towing the skiff out to sea for two days and two nights while Santiago braces the line across his back, eats raw bait fish to keep his strength, nurses a cramped hand, and talks to the birds, the sea, and his absent boy. What settles over the long fight is not hatred but kinship: he calls the marlin his brother even as he promises to kill him. On the third day he brings the great fish alongside and takes him, and lashes a catch bigger than the boat itself to the hull for the long sail home.