For Hemingway, the sea was not just a backdrop, but a stage for his life and struggles. His work The Old Man and the Sea explores the limits and will of man and reveals its philosophy through the sea.
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961)
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, in the Midwestern United States, the second oldest of six children. His father, Clarence Hemingway, an obstetrician-gynecologist, enjoyed sports like fishing and hunting, and his mother, Grace Hall, was a music teacher. Hemingway owes much of his masculinity to his father’s influence. In fact, his father gave him a fishing pole before he turned three and a shotgun when he was ten.
While attending Oak Park River Forest High School, Hemingway developed an interest in literature, serving as editor of the school’s weekly newspaper and contributing to the magazine Tabula Rasa. He was active in school, playing all kinds of sports and leading teams, but his frequent arguments with his mother and his penchant for solitude caused him to run away from home several times.
When the United States entered World War I in April 1917 (at age 18), the year he graduated from high school, Hemingway tried to enlist in the army right before graduation, but his father staunchly opposed it. Hemingway gave up on college and became a reporter for The Kansas City Star after graduating from high school. In his short seven months as a reporter, Hemingway learned a lot of writing skills. For example, the newspaper had a set of rules, such as “use short sentences,” “avoid extreme adjectives,” “pursue a strong handwriting,” and “avoid old slang,” which helped him to write concise prose, and honed his ability to make objective observations and dispassionate descriptions without emotion.
In April 1918, at the age of 19, Hemingway quit his newspaper job and in May volunteered to join a Red Cross unit on the Italian front as a field hospital ambulance driver. On July 8, less than two months into his tour, an enemy mortar shell fell in the middle of the night on the small town of Fossalta di Piave, Italy. Hemingway was severely wounded in both legs, and the man next to him died on the spot. The bombing was described in A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway was hospitalized in an army hospital in Milan and returned home after the armistice (1919), where he met novelist Sherwood Anderson and decided to become a writer. In September 1921, at the age of twenty-two, he married Hadley Richardson, eight years his junior, and in November he went to Paris as a foreign correspondent for the Canadian newspapers The Toronto Star and Star Weekly. As a correspondent, he traveled around Europe, covering the Greco-Turkish War in 1922.
In Paris, Anderson was introduced by the American writer Gertrude Stein, and interacted with many of the writers who came and went from her salon. Among them were the American poet Ezra Pound and James Joyce, author of Ulysses. Stein and Pound tutored Hemingway directly, especially Pound, who read Hemingway’s short stories and deleted most of the adjectives himself.
Hemingway continued to write short stories while living in poverty in Paris, focusing on literature, such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and the posthumously published “A Moveable Feast,” which describes life in Paris.
In 1923 (at age 24), he published Three Stories and Ten Poems, and in 1924, In Our Time, a collection of sketchy short stories, both published in Paris. In October 1925, In Our Time, a collection of short stories, was published in the United States.
In 1925 (age 26), he was introduced to the famous American publisher Charles Scribner by Scott Fitzgerald, whom he had met in Paris, and published his first full-length novel, The Torrents of Spring, in May 1926. All of Hemingway’s works were subsequently published by Charles Scribner.
Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in October 1926 (at the age of 27) and made him an instant celebrity. Set in post-war Paris and Spain, the novel, which explores the hedonistic customs of exiles from different countries, became a favorite among young people, and Hemingway was recognized as a representative of the Lost Generation. Hemingway followed up this success with the short story collection Men without Women in October 1927. He divorced Hadley in April of that year and married Pauline Pfeiffer, a Paris-based reporter for Vogue, a month later.
In 1928 (age 29), he left Paris and returned to the United States, settling in Key West, Florida, where he wrote his major works. He continued to work on A Farewell to Arms, which he had begun in Paris in March of that year, and continued to revise it after his departure, completing it in January 1929, but revised it again when it was decided to serialize it in Scribner’s Magazine, and again when it was published in paperback. The final chapter is a work of such passion that she revised it seventeen times. Pauline gave birth to their second son, Patrick, during the writing of the manuscript, and while he was revising it, his father committed suicide with a handgun in their Oak Park home. Hemingway’s father’s suicide deepened the darkness of Hemingway’s cynical outlook on life. A Farewell to Arms became a bestseller upon its release in September 1929 (at age 30), selling 80,000 copies within four months. It was performed as a play and a movie, as well as translated into numerous foreign languages, and with this one work Hemingway earned the reputation of being America’s greatest writer.
The Great Depression, which began in October 1929 with the crash of the New York stock market, plunged the world into recession throughout 1930, and Hemingway spent much of the year fishing and traveling in Key West, Florida, while writing. In 1932 (age 33), he published Death in the Afternoon, a nonfiction book about bullfighting in Spain, and in October 1933, he published the short story collection Winner Take Nothing. In October 1935 (age 36), he published Green Hills of Africa, a nonfiction account of his hunting trips in Africa. The famous short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was inspired by this trip to Kenya.
In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, he became active in defense of democracy. In February 1937, he traveled to Spain as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), raising money for the government forces. In October, he published a social novel, To Have and Have Not. In Spain, he collaborated with the government in the production of propaganda films, and in June 1938 (age 39), the film script, The Spanish Earth, was published. In October of that year, The Fifth Column and the First Fourth-Nine Stories, which included his only play, The Fifth Column, about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, was published. Hemingway continued to travel back and forth between Spain and the United States.
In March 1939, the Spanish Civil War ended with the victory of the fascist Revolutionary Army, and in November Hemingway separated from Pauline Pfeiffer and moved to a suburb of Havana, Cuba. Upon his return to the United States, Hemingway published his magnum opus, For Whom the Bell Tolls, in October 1940 (at the age of 41), which had taken him more than a year to complete. The epic novel, set during the Spanish Civil War, exploded in popularity and became a bestseller. Shortly after its publication, he divorced Pauline and married Martha Gellhorn, a reporter for Collier’s Weekly whom he had met in Spain, in November.
In 1942 (at the age of 43), as German submarines reached the Caribbean during World War II, Hemingway converted his boat, the Pilar, and for two years, until the spring of 1944, he led a crew of nine as a lookout off the coast of Cuba. After Martha left for Europe in 1943 as a correspondent for Collier’s Weekly, Hemingway traveled to London in 1944 as a correspondent for Collier’s Weekly. By this time, the relationship between Martha and Hemingway had begun to fray.
In June 1944 (age 45), when D-Day began, Hemingway was a correspondent. He accompanied the soldiers through the German advance and was at the head of the Allied forces when Paris was liberated.
When World War II ended in 1945, he returned home and settled in Cuba, where he fished and wrote. In December of that year, he divorced Martha, and in March 1946, he married Mary Welsh, a journalist for Time, for the fourth time.
In 1950 (age 51), ten years after For Whom the Bell Tolls, he published his first novel, Across the River and into the Trees, which was not well received. The following June, in 1951, his mother died, and Hemingway did not attend the funeral, sending only letters and money.
In September 1952 (at age 52), The Old Man and the Sea was published. It was first published in full in the September 1 issue of Life, then in paperback on September 8. The work, with its characteristically terse and powerful prose, restored Hemingway’s reputation and won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953.
In early 1954 (at age 55), while traveling in Africa, his plane crashed in the jungle near Kilimanjaro. Hemingway miraculously survived the crash, although reports suggested he was dead. However, he was seriously injured and his wife, Mary, suffered two broken ribs. In 1954, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as a direct result of The Old Man and the Sea. He was unable to attend the award ceremony in Sweden because his injuries from the plane crash hadn’t healed.
After receiving the Nobel Prize, Hemingway lived and wrote in Havana, Cuba. However, after the success of the Fidel Castro-led Cuban Revolution in 1959, he left Cuba for good in 1960 (at age 61) and moved to Ketchum, Idaho, in the southeastern United States. Hemingway’s home, Finca Vigía (“Farm with a View”), in the suburbs of Havana, is now the Hemingway Museum.
Hemingway published almost nothing after The Old Man and the Sea, and struggled with depression, alcoholism, and other illnesses. After returning to the United States, his symptoms worsened and he underwent electroshock therapy several times. After being in and out of the hospital, he was discharged on July 1, 1961 (age 62) and returned to his home in Ketchum. The following Sunday morning, at 7:30 a.m., his wife Mary heard a gunshot and ran downstairs to find Hemingway lying on the floor, where he had committed suicide by placing the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. This was the end of an eventful life for Hemingway, one of America’s greatest literary figures and a Nobel Prize-winning author. His body is buried in Sun Valley, Idaho.
The Old Man and the Sea book plot
The subject of The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway’s final work, was a true story he told himself in an article he wrote for Esquire in the spring of 1936 called “On the Blue Waves – News from the Gulf of Mexico,” which suggests that it had been in the author’s mind for a long time. Published at a time when it was said that “Hemingway was finished” because he hadn’t produced a major work for nearly a decade after “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “The Old Man and the Sea” received mixed reviews from critics, but it is a story that symbolizes the author’s own inner life as he spent his life pursuing art through solitude, courage, and perseverance, and is a representative work of Hemingway’s existential philosophy.
Santiago, an old man who has been a fisherman all his life, is interested in nothing but baseball, and the only person he shares his heart with and relies on is Manolin, a young boy. Living alone in the Gulf of Mexico, the old man hasn’t caught a fish in 84 days. At first, the boy accompanies him, but when he returns empty handed, he transfers to another boat and goes out to sea alone. But despite the deep wrinkles on his face and the nape of his neck, and the fact that his mind was wandering, the old man’s eyes remained strong and confident. On the 85th day, the old man decides to catch a big fish to break his bad luck, so he sets out as far out to sea as he can. In the middle of the ocean, with no shoreline in sight, the old man sits alone in his carved boat, chatting with the clouds, seabirds, and fish as friends, and watching his fishing line cast deep into the water. Around noon, a fish bites the old man’s line, but the fish does not rise to the surface and continues to drag the boat through the water. The old man waits for the fish to rise, enduring the pain of his shoulder around the line, his hands chafed by the line, hunger, thirst, sleepiness, fear, and loneliness. On the third day, when the exhausted fish rises, the old man “summons all his strength, all his remaining strength, all his long-dead pride, at the cost of all his pain,” and plunges his harpoon into the fish.
Having won the battle with the big fish, the old man hangs it over the side of his boat and sets sail for Havana, but a school of sharks in the deep smells the blood of the big fish and rushes toward the old man’s boat. The old man defeats the sharks with a single blow, and though he foresees another wave of sharks coming, he remains hopeful, muttering, “Men are not made to be defeated. They may be destroyed, but they are never defeated.” However, the old man is attacked by sharks throughout the night and eventually returns home with nothing but a hollow fish spine hanging between his head and tail, devoid of flesh.
“The Old Man and the Sea” is the culmination of Hemingway’s characteristically concise and powerful style. In addition, the image of the old man struggling alone in the middle of the vast ocean with only his thoughts and monologue gives us a glimpse of the lonely writer in his old age. As the old man fights alone in the great outdoors against a fish that is bigger than his sculpture boat, we can realize how strong and dignified the human spirit is as he overcomes all his conditions and limitations, including mental strength, loneliness, pride, and physical strength, to win. In addition, the traveler’s final line, “I never knew that shark tails were so wonderful and beautiful,” when he sees the fish bones that the old man hangs on the boat, represents the beauty of the human struggle to remain hopeful even in defeat. It is this respect for the noble human struggle in the real world that earned Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature.
