This article provides a chronology of Ernest Hemingway’s life, organized by year, and an introduction to the main meanings and features of his masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea.
Ernest Miller Hemingway chronology
Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961) was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, United States.
His father was an obstetrician and gynecologist who enjoyed hunting and fishing, and his mother was a religious woman who loved music.
He spent his summers with his father, who loved to fish and hunt, at their vacation home on the shores of Lake Walloon in northern Michigan. More like his father than his introverted mother, Hemingway’s hobbies and interests in football, swimming, boxing, music, hunting, and literature during his high school years provided him with a wide range of experiences that would later become a consistent source of material for his work.
In 1918, at the age of 19, while serving as a Red Cross worker on the Italian front, he was seriously wounded and spent three months recuperating in a Milan military hospital before returning to the front. His war experience became the basis for A Farewell to Arms.
In 1921, at the age of 22, he married Hadley Richardson and lived in Toronto. In December of that year, he settled in Paris as European correspondent for the Star Weekly.
In 1922, he was introduced to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound by Sherwood Anderson, who were to have an enormous influence on Hemingway in his formative years.
In 1923, he published Three Stories and Ten Poems in Paris.
In 1926, he published The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises. In 1927, he published Men Without Women, which was well received by readers.
In 1929, he published A Farewell to Arms, which sold 80,000 copies in four months and became an instant hit.
In 1932, he published Death in the Afternoon, in 1933, Winner Take Nothing, and in 1935, The Green Hills of Africa.
In 1936, at the age of 37, he worked to raise money to aid government troops in the Spanish Civil War, and that year he published The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, both set in Africa.
In 1937, at the age of 38, he traveled to Spain to collaborate on a film called The Spanish Earth. To Have and Have not was published in October of that year. In 1940, he published For Whom The Bell Tolls, which became a bestseller, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. In 1946, he married Mary Welsh for the fourth time, and in 1950, he published Across the River and into the Trees.
In 1952, at the age of 53, he published The Old Man and the Sea, which won him the ’53 Pulitzer Prize.
In January 1954, he was injured in an airplane crash in Uganda, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that year.
In 1961, at the age of 62, he committed a mysterious shotgun suicide at his home in Idaho, where he was being treated for high blood pressure and diabetes. His death was met with unusual tributes from the White House, the Vatican Palace, and the Kremlin.
The meaning of The Old Man and the Sea and its characters
Hemingway was a representative of the “Lost generation” of the 1920s, a writer who shifted from a negative to a positive attitude toward life, and after publishing To Have and Have not and then For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940, he remained silent for a decade. The reason for this is that the biographical novels he wrote after his literary world shifted from a negative to a positive attitude were not well received, and he lost the necessity to write novels.
Then, in the 1950s, Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea, which redeemed his reputation by dispelling the critics’ claims of a creative decline.
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) is the culmination of Hemingway’s literary oeuvre, and is the culmination of his ideas about literature and life.
According to Kit Singer, who discovered the story’s source material, Hemingway based it on a fisherman he met on the docks. The main character, Santiago, is a real-life fisherman named Manuel Ulivari Montespan. He defected from Cuba to the United States in 1963. The fact that Hemingway rewrote the story more than 200 times before publishing it shows how much effort he put into perfecting it. The author himself said of The Old Man and the Sea, “I feel like I’ve finally written what I’ve been working on my whole life.”
“The Old Man and the Sea” was hailed by The New York Times as ‘a masterpiece by a master master’, and there are several characteristics that can be pointed out.
First, we can find the author’s profound ideas about life in it.
The plot of the work is just a simple fishing episode, but we are deeply impressed by the old man Santiago, who refuses to admit defeat and fights the race with an indomitable spirit. The old man fights and wins a big fish, but is unexpectedly attacked by a school of sharks, leaving him with nothing but a wreckage, but the old man has no regrets. He only sleeps for tomorrow. For the old man, life is meaningless and futile, but he obeys the laws of nature to live for tomorrow. For him, there can be no defeat.
Our lives may be like a fisherman fishing with a piecemeal boat on a ruined sea, but if we persevere in the midst of any hardships, we will never be defeated in life.
In this work, we find the true human figure of the old man Santiago, who is a race against human hardship. This is the author’s fundamental idea.
Second, we can find a wealth of symbolism in it.
From the old man and the boy to the sea, clouds, dolphins, sharks, baseball players, lions, and other sea creatures, there are many deep meanings in them.
The sea is the world we live in, and the old man represents us. In the boy who takes care of the old man, we see the love of humanity, and in the baseball game and the baseball player, we see the interdependence of human beings and the indomitable spirit that endures suffering. In the lions playing on the sunset beach, he sees purity of power and peace.
The old man sees all the creatures of the sea on an equal footing with humans and sees all things on the same level as humans. Even the wind, the bed, the stars, the sun, and the moon are considered brothers. This is the extreme point of the artist’s pan-love spirit. Even though he feels love and respect for the big fish, he feels that it is the law of nature that he has to kill it. The artist’s spirit of pan-love is recognized within the scope of tolerating the laws of nature, which shows his ethics.
Finally, we can point out the concise and focused prose style.
Most of the sentences are colloquial, characterized by simplicity of diction and sentence structure. The words are short and plain, and the vocabulary is extremely economical and fresh. The author reread this work as many as 200 times before deciding to write it. His mastery is evident in the vividness with which he weaves the story together, without neglecting a single word.
