The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. Like his father, he died by suicide, shooting himself in 1961 in his home in Idaho.He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. He was wounded in a plane crash in 1953, after which he became increasingly anxious and depressed.

in 1925, followed by the well-received The Sun Also Rises in 1926.ĭuring the 1930s and 40s, the hard-drinking Hemingway lived in Key West and then in Cuba while continuing to travel widely. With their help and encouragement, Hemingway published his first book of short stories, in the U.S. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. Hemingway married the wealthy Hadley Richardson in 1920, and the couple moved to Paris, where they met other American expatriate writers, including F. He was decorated and sent home to recuperate. During World War I, he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross and was severely wounded in 1918 on the Austro-Italian front while carrying a companion to safety. Hemingway, born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, started working as a reporter for the Kansas City Star in 1917. The book would be his last significant work of fiction before his suicide in 1961. But despite his fame, he had not produced a major literary work in a decade before he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway had become a cult figure whose four marriages and adventurous exploits in big-game hunting and fishing were widely covered in the press. The novella, which was first published in Life magazine, was an allegory referring to the writer’s own struggles to preserve his art in the face of fame and attention.

The critics agreed: The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and became one of his bestselling works. He wrote his publisher the same day, saying he had finished the book and that it was the best writing he had ever done. Ernest Hemingway completes his short novel The Old Man and the Sea.

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