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| The Old Man and The Sea |
Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of one of her closest friends, Jordi Santanyí. Jordi is a great writer, he loves Literature and he likes talking about it with The Grandma. They have talked about the American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman Ernest Hemingway and his work The Old Man and the Sea, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that was first published on a day like today in 1952.
The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952.
It was the last major work of fiction written by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba.
In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.
The Old Man and the Sea tells the story of a battle between an aging, experienced fisherman, Santiago, and a large marlin.
The story opens with Santiago having gone 84 days without catching a fish, and now being seen as salao, the worst form of unluckiness. He is so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail with him and has been told instead to fish with successful fishermen.
The boy visits Santiago's shack each night, hauling his fishing gear, preparing food, talking about 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.
More iformation: Friends of Words
On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago takes his skiff into the Gulf Stream, sets his lines and by noon, has his bait taken by a big fish that he is sure is a marlin. Unable to haul in the great marlin, Santiago is instead pulled by the marlin, and two days and nights pass with Santiago holding onto the line.
Though 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 shall deserve to eat the marlin.
On the third day, the fish begins to circle the skiff. Santiago, worn out and almost delirious, uses all his remaining strength to pull the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with a harpoon. 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.
On his way in to shore, sharks are attracted to the marlin's blood. Santiago kills a great mako shark with his harpoon, but he loses the weapon. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife to the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; 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.
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| Ernest Hemingway |
Santiago knows that he is destroyed and tells the sharks of how they have killed his dreams. Upon reaching the shore before dawn on the next day, Santiago struggles to his shack, carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder, leaving the fish head and the bones on the shore. 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 5.5 m from nose to tail. Pedrico is given the head of the fish, and the other fishermen tell Manolin to tell the old man how sorry they are. Tourists at the nearby café mistakenly take it for a shark. The boy, worried about the old man, cries upon finding him safe asleep and at his injured hands.
Manolin 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.
Written in 1951, The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's final full-length work published during his lifetime. The book, dedicated to Charlie Scribner and to Hemingway's literary editor Max Perkins, was simultaneously published in book form -featuring black and white illustrations by Charles Tunnicliffe and Raymond Sheppard- and featured in Life magazine on September 1, 1952. The first edition print run of the book was 50,000 copies and five million copies of the magazine were sold in two days.
The Old Man and the Sea became a Book of the Month Club selection, and made Hemingway a celebrity.
In May 1953, the novel received the Pulitzer Prize and was specifically cited when in 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature which he dedicated to the Cuban people.
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.
More information: Cliffs Notes
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 short story The Bear and Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick.
Several critics note that Santiago hails from the Canary Islands, and that his Spanish origins have an influence in the novella. After immigrating to Cuba in his 20s, later in life Santiago dreams about the Canary Islands and mixes Cuban and Peninsular Spanish vocabulary. His biography has many similarities to that of Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway’s first mate.
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| Joe Russell & Ernest-Hemingway, Havana, 1932 |
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.
Critics have noted that Santiago was also at least 22 when he immigrated from Spain to Cuba, and thus old enough to be considered an immigrant -and a foreigner- in Cuba.
Hemingway at first planned to use Santiago's story, which became The Old Man and the Sea, as part of an intimacy between mother and son. Relationships in 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 (Esquire, April 1936).
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 is Waldmeir's answer to the question- What is the book's message?
More information: A Research Guides for Students
In 1954, Hemingway wanted to donate his Nobel Prize in Literature gold medal to the Cuban people. To avoid giving it to the Batista government, he donated it to the Catholic Church for display at the sanctuary at El Cobre, a small town outside Santiago de Cuba where the Marian image of Our Lady of Charity is located. The Swedish medal was stolen in the mid 1980s, but the police recovered it within a few days.
The Old Man and the Sea has been adapted for the screen three times: a 1958 film starring Spencer Tracy, a 1990 miniseries starring Anthony Quinn, and a 1999 animated short film.
It also inspired the 2012 Kazakhstani movie The Old Man, which replaces the fisherman with a shepherd struggling to protect his flock from wolves. It is often taught in high schools as a part of the American literature curriculum.
In 2003, the book was listed at number 173 on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's 200 best-loved novels.
More information: The Guardian
All modern American literature comes
from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway
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