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The Old Man and the Sea
Book

The Old Man and the Sea

New York, 1952

Literary Classic

  • Novella
  • Modernism

What It’s About

The Struggle for Existence

The old man, his boat, the admiring boy, the sea, a few clouds, two or three fish, a few birds, the great marlin and finally the sharks – those are the ingredients of this famous novella. Stripping out the complications of modern life, Hemingway presents a story of one man’s timeless struggle both with and against the elements. Survival isn’t simply a Darwinian struggle to determine the fittest, but a need to persevere despite challenges and setbacks: to rise to the occasion but also accept that events can turn a success into a failure. It’s the need to go to sleep at the end of a harrowing ordeal with the simple idea that tomorrow you’ll get up and try again. The work of an aging author, The Old Man and the Sea focuses on the realities of growing old and the desire to remain vital and relevant. Much like the old man in the book, Hemingway found himself looking back on his early successes while finding it ever harder to repeat them. As such, his last completed work of fiction was a triumph over his critics, who had basically declared him finished as a novelist. In the middle of a confusing 20th century and with his characteristically economical style, Hemingway makes the battle of this lone fisherman off the coast of Cuba into a poignant story of humanity’s struggle to find meaning.

Summary

Lost Fortune

Bad luck has haunted Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, for 84 days: All this time, he hasn’t caught a single fish. Even if he is a poor widower and doesn’t have a family to feed, going so long without a catch is a sad result – worse than poverty. It means to have nothing. The other fishermen feel sorry for the old man but keep their distance.

Only the boy Manolin, whom the old man took out to sea when he was just five years old, loves and admires him. Every night, Manolin comes to the beach and helps the old man with the boat, mast, sail, coiled lines and harpoon. But now his parents have forbidden him from going out to sea with the old man: He and his boat are just too much bad luck. Santiago himself prefers that the boy goes out with the others in their lucky boats. They are bringing in good catches.

Baseball and African Lions

The boy offers the old man a beer at the Terrace beach restaurant. They talk about the past. Manolin urges him to accept fresh bait for the following day, which promises to be an especially good one: After all, 85 is a lucky number, and the currents in September are good for catching...

About the Author

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. The son of a country doctor and an opera singer, he learned hunting and fishing from his nature-loving father, laying the groundwork for Hemingway’s fascination with nature and the image of a bluff outdoorsman that he would later cultivate. He started his career as a local reporter in Kansas City. His beginnings as a journalist shaped his minimalistic style as a novelist later in life. During World War I, he volunteered as a paramedic, joining a group of writers and artists around Gertrude Stein in Paris after the war. He spent the winters of 1925 and 1926 in the Austrian Montafontal, where he wrote the novel The Sun Also Rises. Published in 1926, it was his literary breakthrough. Hemingway continued to work as a reporter and war journalist, covering the Greco-Turkish war in 1922, the Spanish Civil War from 1936–1939 and World War II in the ’40s. In 1940, For Whom the Bell Tolls was published. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway often deliberately sought out dangerous, adventurous and risky situations. He loved big-game hunting in Africa and bullfighting and survived two plane crashes, often writing his novels under intense psychological pressure. Like many writers of his day, he was an alcoholic, trying to live life to the fullest but also suffering from depression. Hemingway married four times and had three sons. After a long illness, he committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in his home in Idaho – as had his father before him and his granddaughter Margaux after him.


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