Old Man And The Sea

The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from loss and transforms them into a magnificent twentieth-century classic.

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. At seventeen he left home to join the Kansas City Star as a reporter, then volunteered to serve in the Red Cross during World War I. He was severely wounded at the Italian front and was awarded the Croce di Guerra. He moved to Paris in 1921, where he devoted himself to writing fiction, and where he fell in with the expatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. His other novels include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), To Have and Have Not (1937), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, with special recognition of his "mastery in the art of modern narration most lately revealed in his novel The Old Man and the Sea." He died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.