1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction to be produced

by Hemingway and published in his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it centers upon

Santiago, an aging fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.

The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and was cited by

the Nobel Committee as contributing to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature

to Hemingway in 1954.

Plot summary The Old Man and the Sea is the story of a

battle between an old, experienced fisherman and a large marlin. The novel opens with the

explanation that the fisherman, who is named Santiago, has gone 84 days without catching

a fish. Santiago is considered "salao", the worst form of unluckiness. In fact, he is

so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail

with the old man and been ordered to fish with more successful fishermen. Still dedicated

to the old man, however, the boy visits Santiago's shack each night, hauling back his fishing

gear, getting him food and discussing American baseball and his favorite player Joe DiMaggio.

Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venture far out into the Gulf Stream,

north of Cuba in the Straits of Florida to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is

near its end. Thus on the eighty-fifth day, Santiago sets

out alone, taking his skiff far onto the Gulf Stream. He sets his lines and, by noon of

the first day, a big fish that he is sure is a marlin takes his bait. Unable to pull

in the great marlin, Santiago instead finds the fish pulling his skiff. Two days and two

nights pass in this manner, during which the old man bears the tension of the line with

his body. Though he is wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a compassionate

appreciation for his adversary, often referring to him as a brother. He also determines that

because of the fish's great dignity, no one will be worthy of eating the marlin. On the

third day of the ordeal, the fish begins to circle the skiff, indicating his tiredness

to the old man. Santiago, now completely worn out and almost in delirium, uses all the strength

he has left in him to pull the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with a harpoon, ending

the long battle between the old man and the tenacious fish. Santiago straps the marlin

to the side of his skiff and heads home, thinking about the high price the fish will bring him

at the market and how many people he will feed.

While Santiago continues his journey back to the shore, sharks are attracted to the

trail of blood left by the marlin in the water. The first, a great mako shark, Santiago kills

with his harpoon, losing that weapon in the process. He makes a new harpoon by strapping

his knife to the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; in total, five

sharks are slain and many others are driven away. But the sharks keep coming, and by nightfall

the sharks have almost devoured the marlin's entire carcass, leaving a skeleton consisting

mostly of its backbone, its tail and its head. Finally reaching the shore before dawn on

the next day, Santiago struggles on the way to his shack, carrying the heavy mast on his

shoulder. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and falls into a deep sleep.

A group of fishermen gather the next day around the boat where the fish's skeleton is still

attached. One of the fishermen measures it to be 18 feet from nose to tail. Tourists

at the nearby café mistakenly take it for a shark. Manolin, worried during the old man's

endeavor, cries upon finding him safe asleep. The boy brings him newspapers and coffee.

When the old man wakes, they promise to fish together once again. Upon his return to sleep,

Santiago dreams of his youth—of lions on an African beach.

Background and publication Written in 1951, and published in 1952, The

Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's final work published during his lifetime. The book, dedicated

to Hemingway's literary editor Maxwell Perkins, was featured in Life magazine on September

1, 1952, and five million copies of the magazine were sold in two days. The Old Man and the

Sea also became a Book of the Month Club selection, and made Hemingway a celebrity. Published

in book form on September 1, 1952, the first edition print run was 50,000 copies. The illustrated

edition featured black and white illustrations by Charles Tunnicliffe and Raymond Sheppard.

The novel received the Pulitzer Prize in May, 1953, and was specifically cited when he was

awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. The success of The Old Man and the Sea made

Hemingway an international celebrity. The Old Man and the Sea is taught at schools around

the world and continues to earn foreign royalties.

Hemingway wanted to use the story of the old man, Santiago, to show the honor in struggle

and to draw biblical parallels to life in his modern world. Possibly based on the character

of Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway had initially planned to use Santiago's story, which became

The Old Man and the Sea, as part of an intimacy between mother and son and also the fact of

relationships that cover most of the book relate to the Bible, which he referred to

as "The Sea Book." Some aspects of it did appear in the posthumously published Islands

in the Stream. Hemingway mentions the real life experience of an old fisherman almost

identical to that of Santiago and his marlin in On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter.

Literary significance and criticism The Old Man and the Sea served to reinvigorate

Hemingway's literary reputation and prompted a reexamination of his entire body of work.

The novel was initially received with much popularity; it restored many readers' confidence

in Hemingway's capability as an author. Its publisher, Scribner's, on an early dust jacket,

called the novel a "new classic," and many critics favorably compared it with such works

as William Faulkner's "The Bear" and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

Santiago as a Spaniard "'Eyes the Same Color of the Sea': Santiago's

Expatriation from Spain and Ethnic Otherness in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea" focuses

on the old man's national identity. Using baseball references, the article points out

that Santiago was at least 22 years old when he moved from Spain to Cuba. "Born in Spain’s

Canary Islands, Santiago moved to Cuba as a young man; this circumstance has a significant

impact on his social condition." Santiago was old enough to have a Spanish identity

when he immigrated, and the article examined how being a foreigner would influence his

life on the island. Because Santiago was too poor to move back to Spain—many Spaniards

moved to Cuba and then back to Spain at that time—he adopted Cuban culture like religious

ceremonies, Cuban Spanish, and fishing in skiffs in order to acculturate in the new

country. Gregorio Fuentes, who many critics believe

was an inspiration for Santiago, was a blue-eyed man born on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.

After going to sea at age ten on ships that called in African ports, he migrated permanently

to Cuba when he was 22. After 82 years in Cuba, Fuentes attempted to reclaim his Spanish

citizenship in 2001. Religion as a motif

Joseph Waldmeir's essay "Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway's Religion of Man" is a favorable

critical reading of the novel—and one which has defined analytical considerations since.

Perhaps the most memorable claim therein is Waldmeir's answer to the question—What is

the book's message? "The answer assumes a third level on which

The Old Man and the Sea must be read—as a sort of allegorical commentary on all his

previous work, by means of which it may be established that the religious overtones of

The Old Man and the Sea are not peculiar to that book among Hemingway's works, and that

Hemingway has finally taken the decisive step in elevating what might be called his philosophy

of Manhood to the level of a religion." Waldmeir was one of the most prominent critics

to wholly consider the function of the novel's Christian imagery, made most evident through

Hemingway's obvious reference to the crucifixion of Christ following Santiago's sighting of

the sharks that reads: "‘Ay,′ he said aloud. There is no translation

for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling

the nail go through his hands and into the wood."

An unrealistic novel

One of the most outspoken critics of The Old Man and the Sea is Robert P. Weeks. His 1962

piece "Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea" presents his claim that the novel is a weak

and unexpected divergence from the typical, realistic Hemingway. In juxtaposing this novel

against Hemingway's previous works, Weeks contends:

"The difference, however, in the effectiveness with which Hemingway employs this characteristic

device in his best work and in The Old Man and the Sea is illuminating. The work of fiction

in which Hemingway devoted the most attention to natural objects, The Old Man and the Sea,

is pieced out with an extraordinary quantity of fakery, extraordinary because one would

expect to find no inexactness, no romanticizing of natural objects in a writer who loathed

W.H. Hudson, could not read Thoreau, deplored Melville's rhetoric in Moby Dick, and who

was himself criticized by other writers, notably Faulkner, for his devotion to the facts and

his unwillingness to 'invent.'" Some critics suggest "The Old Man and the

Sea" was Hemingway's reaction towards the criticism of his most recent work, Across

the River and into the Trees. The negative reviews for Across the River and into the

Trees distressed him, and may have been a catalyst to his writing of The Old Man and

the Sea. References

Sources

Further reading Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway. New York:

Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. ISBN 0-8166-0191-7.  Jobes, Katharine T., ed.. Twentieth Century

Interpretations of The Old Man and the Sea. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

ISBN 0-13-633917-4.  External links

Read Online at Classic Literature Hemingway Archives, John F. Kennedy Library

The Old Man and the Sea—slideshow by Life magazine

Rare, Unseen: Hemingway in Cuba—slideshow by Life magazine

"Hemingway's fisherman the Old Man of the Sea dies"—BBC News

"Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure: Cuba". PBS. Retrieved January 21, 2006.