'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. Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same colour as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.'
Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. It was The Old Man and the Sea that won for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here, in a perfectly crafted story, is unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements in which he lives.
'Not only the finest long short story that Hemingway has ever written, but one of the finest written by anyone' Listener.
'Hemingway brings to the old man's tragic fishing trip all his real, deep, intuitive understanding of simple men who face primitive, ill-rewarded fates' Standard.
'As an example of 'declarative' prose it is unsurpassed in Hemingway's oeuvre. Every word tells and there is not a word too many' Anthony Burgess, Nintey-Nine Novels.
Author Biography: Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 as the son of a doctor and the second of six children. After a stint as an ambulance driver at the Italian front, Hemingway came home to America in 1919, only to return to the battlefield - this time as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish war - in 1922. Resigning from journalism to focus on his writing instead, he moved to Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with fellow American expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.
Through the years, Hemingway travelled widely and wrote avidly, becoming an internationally recognized literary master of his craft. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.
Industry Reviews
Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 for 'his powerful style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration as most lately revealed in his novel The Old Man and the Sea'. Reading his spare economic style is a tonic. This short novel tells of an old fisherman, a young boy and a big fish. The story is of a heroic duel between the old fisherman and a huge marlin way off Havana, and its subsequent destruction by sharks. Much wisdom, soul searching and inspiring prose: 'A man can be destroyed but not defeated...' A fine story displaying the dignity of the human spirit, sometimes hard to spot in real life. (Kirkus UK)
