“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” (opening line).
The Old Man and the Sea is a rich and deep novella about an old fisherman named Santiago and his Herculean effort to overcome a fishing dry-spell. Much like the character, Ernest Hemingway was also going through a dry-spell. The Old Man and the Sea was written at a time when Hemingway was considered a writer in decline. His last critically praised work was more than a decade old: For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940 – read my reflections on For Whom The BellTolls and its Pulitzer controversy here. Hemingway had published Across The River And Into The Trees in 1950, the first book he had published post-World War II, and it was panned by critics. In a word,
View original post 1,758 more words
Recent Comments