“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 efforts to overcome a dry-spell of fishing. Much like the book’s struggling protagonist, while at the time of writing this novel, Ernest Hemingway was also going through a dry-spell of his own. The Old Man and the Sea was written during a time when Hemingway was believed to be a writer in decline. His last critically praised work had been published over a decade prior (For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940 – read my reflections on For Whom The Bell Tolls and its Pulitzer controversy here). Hemingway had published Across The River And Into The Trees in 1950, his first post-World War II book, and it was mostly panned by critics. By the time The Old Man and the Sea was released, it too was met with skepticism from certain critics, as well. In a word, the publication of The Old Man and the Sea was not unlike a great fish being captured by an old fisherman only to be torn apart by sharks as it was dragged into the harbor.
Hemingway dedicated The Old Man and the Sea “To Charlie Scribner And To Max Perkins,” his old friends. Charlie Scribner was the President of the famous New York publishing house Charlie Scribner & Sons, and Max Perkins was Hemingway’s editor (Mr. Perkins was also the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and other famous writers). Both Scribner and Perkins had passed away before the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway’s new editor at Scribner was Wallace Meyer. After the lukewarm reception of Across The River and Into The Trees, Hemingway wrote to Mr. Meyer with the hope of reviving his reputation with a new book. When finished, Hemingway said it was “The best I can write ever for all of my life.” After some initial mixed reviews, The Old Man and the Sea elevated Hemingway’s literary reputation to new unparalleled heights. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and in 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his acceptance speech, which was delivered by John M. Cabot, U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, Hemingway offered a terse assessment of the life of a writer – a solitary experience which compels one to stretch out beyond known horizons. He dedicated his Nobel Prize to the Cuban people, but instead of giving his medal to the Batista government (the military dictatorship in Cuba) Hemingway donated it to the Catholic Church to be placed on display at the El Cobre Basilica, a small town outside Santiago de Cuba.
Hemingway first mentioned the idea for The Old Man and the Sea as early as 1936 in an interview with Esquire Magazine. The inspiration for the story was likely based, in part, on Hemingway’s own fishing boat captain, Gregorio Fuentes, a blue-eyed Cuban fisherman who led a storied life on the ocean. A portion of The Old Man and the Sea was initially published in Life Magazine and even these small snippets became wildly popular. After it was officially published, Hemingway won a string of accolades. The Old Man and the Sea was made into a 1958 movie starring Spencer Tracy (click here to read my review of the film). In later years, a miniseries was aired in the 1990s and a stop-action animation version was also released. It won an Oscar in 1999. I recently watched the animated film and was struck by its beautiful, impressionistic re-telling of the story.
The short novella reads like a fable. Unlike Captain Ahab’s fiendish and maddeningly obsessive quest in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Hemingway’s old man, Santiago, is a sympathetic character. He is hopeful but down on his luck. He is a staunch fan of baseball, and regularly compares himself to the ‘Great Dimaggio,’ or Joe Dimaggio, the famous center fielder for the New York Yankees (1936-1951). Santiago remains undeterred and steadfast in his support of the Yankees even if they lose a game. His commitments are unwavering. He believes in the power and mythos of the ‘Great Dimaggio.’
The other fishermen of Cuba generally do not respect Santiago so he befriends a young boy named Manolin who assists him, but Manolin’s parents prevent the boy from fishing with Santiago because of Santiago’s bad luck. Santiago has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish, branding him unlucky (or a salao, the worst form of unluckiness). Santiago is “thin” and “gaunt” with speckled brown skin and deep blue eyes:
“Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated” (10).
Santiago is a reader of newspapers (there are many references to newspapers and baseball games throughout the story). In the story, we are offered little glimpses into Santiago’s upbringing. As a young man, Santiago spent time along the “long golden beaches” of Africa. He now dreams of lions who hunted along those beaches –a memory of his early years growing up along the Canary Islands.
Santiago awakens early in the morning on the eighty-fifth day without a fish and he takes his little skiff out to sea –he loves the sea. He follows a circling bird outward until a huge fish catches his line. Santiago wrestles with the fish (a marlin) for two days and nights as it drags him eastward out to sea. He watches the fish through the water and cannot believe how big it is (we later learn the fish is 18-feet long). However, unlike Ahab, Santiago has no antipathy toward his catch. In fact, he respects the marlin and refers to him as a brother. Exhausted, he finally catches the marlin by piercing it with a harpoon. As he tows the marlin back to harbor, he also battles and kills several sharks who strike at the best meat of the fish. One wounded shark takes Santiago’s club, while the other sharks are struck by Santiago’s knife and oar. When he finally arrives back in the harbor, Santiago’s marlin has been mostly eaten except for his head and tail.
Santiago, sore and fatigued, trudges back to his shack and collapses. The boy, Manolin, awakens Santiago in the morning with coffee and a newspaper. The boy cries at the sight of Santiago’s injured hands. He describes how the townsfolk searched for Santiago when he did not return after two days. Once rested, Santiago decides to donate the head of the marlin to Pedrico, another fisherman, and he offers the skeleton to Manolin so that he may fashion a spear. Nearby, a group of tourists at a cafe gaze upon the great marlin still attached to Santiago’s skiff and they mistake it for a shark. At the end, Santiago falls sleep again and he dreams of the lions on the beaches of Africa.
This is the story of an old man whose sunniest days are behind him. He dreams of strength, youth, and vitality –of strong lions in Africa and of the “Great Dimaggio”– but they are only dreams. For Santiago, fishing comes to serve as a metaphor for his elder years as he tries reclaim his lost strength. Likewise, at the time of writing The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway was also at a point in his career wherein many critics wondered if he was an artist in decline. With this novella, Hemingway thoughtfully explores returning to the sea one more time to see if he can still fish out a truly great work. In my opinion he succeeded, despite all the ravenous shark-like critics waiting to rip apart his final marlin hoisted out of the depths.
Notable Quotations:
“The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray blue hills behind it” (35).
“It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea and the old man had always considered it so and respected it. But now he said his thoughts aloud many times since there was no one that they could annoy” (39).
“He looked across the sea and knew how alone he was now. But he could see the prisms in the deep dark water and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm. The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea” (60-61).
William Faulkner, Hemingway’s greatest literary rival at the time, praised The Old Man and the Sea in the following single paragraph review published in Shenandoah Magazine (a major literary magazine of Washington and Lee University):
“His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries. This time, he discovered God, a Creator. Until now, his men and women had made themselves, shaped themselves out of their own clay; their victories and defeats were at the hands of each other, just to prove to themselves or one another how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It’s all right. Praise God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me kept him from touching it any further.”
Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
Below is a copy of the text of Hemingway’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1954 (delivered by the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden on account of Hemingway’s poor health):
“Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.
No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.
It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.”
To read my notes on reading The Paris Review’s famous interview with Hemingway (1958) click here.
On the 1953 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The Fiction Jury in 1953 consisted of Roy W. Cowden, an English and Creative Writing Professor from the University of Michigan; and Eric P. Kelly, a Dartmouth English professor and author of children’s books –most notably The Trumpeter of Krakow (1929), winner of the Newbury Medal.
- Roy W. Cowden (1883-1961) was a professor at the University of Michigan where he serves as Director of the Avery Hopwood Prize Program from 1935 to 1952, a cash prize series of creative writing awards in fiction and poetry. Today, there is an award in his name at the University of Michigan.
- Eric P. Kelly (1884-1960) was a professor of English at Dartmouth College and briefly a lecturer at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He won the 1929 Newbery Medal for his children’s book, The Trumpeter of Krakow.
Again in 1953, Kelly and Cowden were split in their report to the Pulitzer Advisory Board. Kelly supported Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, while Cowden was for Carl Jones’s Jefferson Sellek. They both listed numerous other options in the jury report. With a Pulitzer Prize being long overdue for Hemingway, especially after the snub of For Whom The Bell Tolls, the Board’s choice was easily made. Apparently, Professor Cowden was greatly displeased with this award, and so he departed the Fiction jury, declining to serve again the following year.
While Hemingway never had a word of reproach for his earlier Pulitzer Prize snub, upon winning for The Old Man and the Sea, he wrote to Charles Poore of The New York Times stating “…I had never understood the Pulitzer Prize very well but that I had beaten Tony Pulitzer shooting and maybe it was for that.” This was a reference to Herbert “Tony” Pulitzer, son of the founder of the prize, Joseph Pulitzer, though as far as I am aware, Tony Pulitzer was never closely involved with the Pulitzer Prizes unlike his siblings, Ralph Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer II.
Regarding the potential influence of Hemingway’s Nobel Prize win over the decision to finally award him a Pulitzer Prize, James F. English writes in his book The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value: “…the likelihood that in 1954 the Swedish Academy would seize on Hemingway’s ‘outstanding work’ of the ‘preceding year’ may well have weighed on the Pulitzer jury when they declared The Old Man and the Sea the best novel of 1953. For while the Pulitzer is a best-novel prize, this does not mean it has no aspiration to define a canon of great American writers, a hall of literary fame; the Pulitzers were, after all, inspired by the example of Alfred Nobel. Those involved in the Pulitzer had been greatly embarrassed when Faulkner won the Nobel in 1949 without having received the ostensibly legitimating national honor of their own award: it was this glaring failure to recognize greatness that opened the door, a few months later, to the founding of the National Book Awards. To repeat such a failure with respect to the even more colossal figure of Hemingway (whom the Pulitzer’s board had wanted to honor back in 1941 for his novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, but whose politics had been so unpalatable to members of the fiction jury that they would not even nominate him) would have been a great favor to the upstart NBAs” (58).
In 1953, there was a sizable shift in leadership at Columbia University (which oversaw the Pulitzer Prizes). General Dwight D. Eisenhower, after serving a leave of absence in order to head NATO forces in 1951 and running for President of the United States, officially vacated his position as President of Columbia University. He was succeeded by Grayson Kirk, a portly, pipe-smoking man who previously served as an advisor to the State Department and as a key leader during the formation of the United Nations. In his tenure as president, he would oversee a period of extraordinary growth for Columbia University as well as considerable cultural tumult that arose in the 1960s. Kirk later drew the ire of students for deciding to construct a gymnasium in Morningside Park (which was seen as a symbol of the university’s distance from the Harlem community and its interests); he was attacked for his membership in the Institute for Defense Analyses (a consortium of universities conducting research for the government); and also for taking a controlling interest in a cigarette corporation whose sale would bring revenues to Columbia; and finally, he mishandled the explosive student demonstrations in 1968 which brought widespread criticism and negative press coverage. Kirk served as President of Columbia University from 1953-1968 (he resigned abruptly following his fateful decision to call up the police to quell student protests in 1968). He then assumed the role of President Emeritus in order to continue raising funds for the university, and he also continued to serve on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Association of American Universities before passing away in 1997. At any rate, 1953 was Grayson Kirk’s first official year as President of Columbia University, which included oversight of the Pulitzer Prize Board, though he had technically served as Acting President since 1951.
Also, in 1953-1954 journalist John Hohenberg began his long tenure as Administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes (technically, he replaced Frank Fackenthal who resigned from Columbia University in 1948, though since Fackenthal’s departure, Dean Ackerman had briefly served in the role in an unofficial capacity). Mr. Hohenberg served as Administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes until he resigned in 1974, though he remained onboard for an additional two years as “emeritus administrator” thereafter. By 1976, he had helped to transform the Pulitzer Advisory Board into an autonomous award-granting body (henceforth known as the Pulitzer Prize Board), among a flurry of huge changes and transformations that bolstered the Pulitzer Prizes for years to come. His two books on the history of the Pulitzer Prizes are highly recommended reading from me.
But returning to the year at hand, in his fourth year as a Columbia University journalism professor, John Hohenberg was invited to attend a meeting of the Pulitzer Advisory Board by his Dean, the ailing Carl W. Ackerman who was nearing retirement. According to Hohenberg’s The Pulitzer Diaries, Dean Ackerman invited him along to the board meeting by suggesting, “maybe you can help me by taking a few notes.” At the time, Ackerman had been serving as secretary of the Advisory Board, and he carried with him an armful of manila folders filled with various Pulitzer jury reports, and a large book entitled “Minutes of the Advisory Board on the Pulitzer Prizes.” The Board met in the World Room at Columbia University’s School of Journalism (in the earlier days of the Pulitzer Prizes, from what I can tell, the Board met in the Trustees Room in the Low Memorial Library).
Typically, I include a brief biography of the author in my Pulitzer Prize reviews, however I have written extensively on Ernest Hemingway’s biography elsewhere. Click here to read my notes on the epic life of Ernest Hemingway.
Film Adaptation:
- The Old Man and the Sea (1958)
- Director: John Sturges
- Starring: Spencer Tracy
Further Reading:
- The Torrents of Spring (1926)
- The Sun Also Rises (1926)
- A Farewell to Arms (1929)
- To Have and Have Not (1937)
- For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), denied the Pulitzer Prize
- Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
- The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Pulitzer Prize-winner
Literary Context in 1952-1953:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1952): awarded to French novelist and short story writer, François Mauriac, “for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life.”
- National Book Award (1953): Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the top bestseller in 1952 was The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain. The second The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (the prior year’s Pulitzer Prize-winner), followed by East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Other books on the list that year was My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier, Giant by Edna Ferber, and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.
- The works of André Gide were placed on the Catholic Church’s “Index of Forbidden Books” by Pope Pius XII.
- Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot was published.
- Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap debuted in London. She also published three novels in 1952.
- John Steinbeck’s East of Eden was published.
- Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano was published.
- Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
1952 was a fairly extraordinary year for American letters. The Old Man and the Sea was a top-tier selection for the Pulitzer Prize, even if it may have been a slight mea culpa after the infamous snub of Ernest Hemingway for For Whom The Bell Tolls. And while novels like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden would have been equally worthy of consideration for the prize, I found The Old Man and the Sea to be a deep and enduring work, a superlative selection for the Pulitzer Prize in 1953.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York, Scribner’s and Simon & Schuster, 2003.
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