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The Old Man & The Sea (fiction)

Ernest Hemingway (1952)

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THE A5 BOOK REVIEW

The Old Man and the Sea is a fictional story written by Ernest Hemingway in 1951 about a battle between an old experienced Cuban fisherman named Santiago and a legendary fish.  Santiago has gone 65 days without catching a fish, and he decides to go farther out in the Gulf Stream to try to change his fortune.  By noon, he has a great monster of a marlin on the line.  They struggle for two days and two nights, and despite being in pain, the old fisherman develops great respect for his dignified adversary.  On the third day, an exhausted and delirious Santiago manages to bring the giant marlin close to the boat and to stab him with a harpoon.  On the return home, Santiago is forced to fight sharks attracted by the blood, but he just can’t fight them all.  In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.​
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OTHER A5 RECOMMENDED TRAVEL BOOKS - ERNEST HEMINGWAY

book cover of The Sun Also Rises
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Ernest Hemingway is of course an amazing writer, known for his adventurous lifestyle, his love of bull fighting, and for several classics in American literature.   He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.  Click here to learn more about Ernest Hemingway.

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GREAT QUOTES FROM THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

“You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?” 

“Fish," he said softly, aloud, "I'll stay with you until I am dead.”

"His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries. This time, he discovered God, a Creator. Until now, his men and women had made themselves, shaped themselves out of their own clay; their victories and defeats were at the hands of each other, just to prove to themselves or one another how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It’s all right. Praise God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me kept him from touching it any further."
- William Faulkner, in a review of his rival's work, nicely described in this article at openculture.com

"There isn’t any symbolism,  The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man … The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."
- Ernest Hemingway, in a response to critic Bernard Berenson



INTERESTING LINKS:

  • ​The fish was an Atlantic Blue Marlin, which Hemingway frequently fished for while living in Florida and Cuba.  Not to be confused with a swordfish, Atlantic Blue Marlin are large billfish that can get up to 14 feet long and weigh 2,000 pounds.  Learn more about this great fish at National Geographic.
  • The September 1952 Life magazine featuring the story quickly sold out, making Hemingway even more of a celebrity and making the magazine a collector's issue.

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