His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries.” – William Faulkner.
The Old Man and the Sea,
an apparently simple fable, represents the mature Hemingway at his
best, and it is still one of his most read books. In 1954 Hemingway was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for his mastery of the art of
narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”
Hemingway’s
style was famously simple. In responding to a critic, he said “Does he
really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know
the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and
simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.” Using these
simpler and better words he tells the unforgettable story of Santiago,
an old Cuban fisherman down on his luck, who goes out alone far from the
shore in search of one last victory and catches a huge marlin longer
than his boat. He is tested to the very limits of his skill and strength
and returns “destroyed but not defeated.” This, of course, also refers
to Hemingway, who, in his last years, was in constant pain from years of
adventures and accidents but still able to do his best work. A classic
novella that can be read in a single sitting.
Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899–1961)
was an American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and
sportsman. He loved Cuba, where he had a home, and where he placed his
Nobel Prize medal in the custody of the Catholic Church for the benefit
of the local people. His economical and understated style—which he
termed the iceberg theory—has had a strong influence on
twentieth-century fiction. Many of his books are considered classics of
American literature. Writer Richard Ford calls Fitzgerald, Hemingway and
Faulkner “the Three Kings who set the measure for every writer since.”
