The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
Summary
Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty four days without a fish, long enough that the parents of Manolin, the boy who loves him, have ordered the boy onto a luckier boat. On the eighty fifth day Santiago rows out alone, far beyond the other boats, and hooks a marlin bigger than his skiff.
What follows is three days and two nights, told almost entirely inside one man's hands and head. The fish tows him out of sight of land. He braces the line against his back, eats raw dolphin fish and flying fish to keep his strength, talks to his cramping left hand, to the fish, whom he calls his brother, and to the great DiMaggio, and endures. When the marlin finally circles and he kills it with the harpoon, the victory lasts about a page: the blood calls the sharks, and the rest of the voyage home is a fight he cannot win, defended with a lashed knife, a club and finally the tiller, until nothing is left alongside but the skeleton, eighteen feet of it, for the tourists to misidentify.
The prose is the plainest Hemingway ever wrote, and the most quoted line, that a man can be destroyed but not defeated, is earned rather than decorative. Manolin's tears at the end do the rest.
It is barely a hundred pages and asks for a single sitting.
Best for readers who want Hemingway distilled to one man, one fish and one idea about defeat, with none of the posturing that mars the weaker books.
Historical Context & Significance
The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953, Hemingway's first despite two decades of eligibility. Its publication was itself an event: Life printed the complete novella, all 26,531 words, in its issue of 1 September 1952, and sold 5.3 million copies in two days; the Scribner's edition sat on the bestseller list for twenty six weeks.
The context was a rescue. Across the River and Into the Trees had been mauled in 1950, and the obituaries of Hemingway's talent were being drafted when this appeared and was hailed at once, Time among many calling it a masterpiece. When the Nobel committee gave him the 1954 Prize in Literature, this was the only work its citation named.
It was also effectively the last word: he published no further fiction of consequence in his lifetime, and died in 1961. Later critics have periodically called the novella overrated, sentimental beneath its stoicism, and the argument continues in classrooms everywhere, since it remains the Hemingway most people read first.