Novel
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway · 1952
Synopsis
Cuba. An old fisherman, who fishes alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream, has caught nothing for eighty-four days; the boy who accompanied him at the start has been put on another boat by his parents, but remains his friend ashore. On the eighty-fifth day he goes out farther than the others and, around noon, hooks a marlin longer than his skiff. The fish does not come up and tows the boat out to sea; the man holds the line across his back, unable to make it fast, eats raw tuna to keep up his strength and steers at night by the glow of Havana.
Context
The text was written in Cuba in six to eight weeks, between December 1950 and February 1951, ten years after his last great success and after a novel that the press had slated. Life magazine published it in full on 1 September 1952 and sold more than five million copies in two days; the book followed a week later. Its author received the Pulitzer the following year, then the Nobel, the Academy citing this text by name. Injured the same year in two plane crashes in Uganda, which the newspapers had believed fatal, he did not travel to Stockholm, where his speech was read by the American ambassador.
Who it is for
A short narrative, under a hundred and fifty pages in a paperback edition, with no division into chapters.
Prizes and reception
Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and the last major work of fiction published in its author's lifetime.
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