Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school he reported for a few months for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to enlist with the World War I ambulance drivers. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1922, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent, and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s "Lost Generation" expatriate community. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's first novel, was published in 1926.After his 1927 divorce from Hadley Richardson, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned from Spanish Civil War where he had acted as a journalist, and after which he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. They separated when he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II; during which he was present at the Normandy Landings and liberation of Paris.Shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in two plane crashes that left him in pain or ill-health for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and 1940s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho, where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961.

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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.

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Several weeks ago, along with several hundred other critics and newspaper men, I received a present from Life magazine. It consisted of a set of galley proofs of some material that Life was going to publish in the issue which would appear on Thursday, Aug. 28. Ordinarily a book reviewer is not concerned with what material magazines publish. But this was a rather special case. The proofs were of Ernest Hemingway's new novel, "The Old Man and the Sea," and this was the first time that such a situation had arisen, that a novel by one of the world's most celebrated writers was to appear in a magazine complete in one issue eleven days before its publication in book form. Today you can buy "The Old Man and the Sea" in Life for 20 cents. On Monday, Sept. 8, Scribners will publish it for $3. Mr. Hemingway, whose books have won him a world- wide audience, is now being presented to a new mass audience at bargain rates. What the book sellers who have distributed his works for twenty-six years think of this situation is not on record.

Hemingway's Reaction What Mr. Hemingway thinks about it is on record, in a Life advertisement: "I'm very excited about 'The Old Man and the Sea', and that it is coming out in Life so that many people will read it who could not afford to buy it. That makes me much happier than to have a Nobel Prize." What Mr. Hemingway thinks about his book also is quoted in the advertisement: "Whatever I learned is in the story but I hope it reads simply and straight and all the things that are in it do not show but only are with you after you have read it * * *. Don't you think it is a strange damn story that it should affect all of us (me especially) the way it does? I have had to read it now over 200 times and everytime it does something to me. It's as though I had gotten finally what I had been working for all my life." "The Old Man and the Sea" is a short novel, only 27,000 words. It is much simpler and enormously better than Mr. Hemingway's last book, "Across the River and Into the Trees." No phony glamour girls and no bullying braggarts sentimentalized almost to parody distort its honest and elemental theme. No outbursts of spite or false theatricalism impede the smooth rush of its narrative. Within the sharp restrictions imposed by the very nature of his story Mr. Hemingway has written with sure skill. Here is the master technician once more at the top of his form, doing superbly what he can do better than anyone else. This is the story of an old Cuban fisherman who had gone eighty-four days without making a catch and of what happened when he hooked a monster marlin on the eighty- fifth day. Alone in his little skiff, unable to fasten the line because the giant fish would break it if he did not lessen the strain with his own body and pay out more line when necessary, the old man endured days and nights of hunger, exhaustion and pain from the line cutting his hands. And finally he caught the fish and lashed it to the side of his skiff only to spend his return voyage fighting off sharks. Courage in Face of Danger The excitement and tension of the old man's adventure, the magnificence of the great marlin and the beauty of days and nights alone on the Gulf Stream are all well conveyed in "The Old Man and the Sea." Mr. Hemingway has always excelled in describing physical adventure and the emotional atmosphere of it. And many of his stories have glorified courage in the face of danger. This one does, too, for the old man is the very embodiment of dogged courage. "Man is not meant for defeat," says Mr. Hemingway. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated"--that is if he has enough courage. Mr. Hemingway wrote about the same theme in one of his best short stories, "The Undefeated." But in that story the matador who would not acknowledge defeat had no other attribute except his foolhardy courage. In "The Old Man and the Sea" the Cuban fisherman is also an elementary character; but with a significant difference. He is not only courageous. He is humble and gently proud, aware of beauty and filled with a sense of brotherhood with nature. And he has a loving heart. These attributes have not been common in Hemingway characters in the past. Since they are admirable and Mr. Hemingway admires them, the moral climate of "The Old Man and the Sea" is fresh and healthy and the old man's ordeal is moving. But good as "The Old Man and the Sea" is, it is good only in a limited way. The fisherman is not a well-characterized individual. He is a symbol of an attitude toward life. He often thinks and talks poetically and symbolically and so artificially. The old man thought: "Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea." A poetic and beautiful thought, but it seems Mr. Hemingway's rather than the old man's.

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Once again I return to the work of Ernest Hemingway after an almost 50 year hiatus. The Old Man and the Sea is a magnificent story. At one level it is the tale of a man and a fish, at another, a story of man versus nature, at yet another, the story of the culture of manhood, courage, bravery in the face of existence, and at yet another a history of what life was like when individuals were more the central actors on the human stage and not groups or organizations.

At the most basic level the very elderly fisherman, Santiago, goes out in his small fishing boat after 84 days without hooking a decent fish. He goes far out, and hooks a gigantic 18 foot long sword fish. The battle then begins, and the fish drags the small boat and Santiago far out to sea. For two days they battle, and Santiago wins that battle, but then loses the great fish on the way home to the scavenger sharks who find him easy prey. Hemingway celebrates the courage and raw guts of this old man, even recounting a time in Casablanca when he had spent an entire day in an arm wrestling match with a much larger man in a seaside tavern. Hemingway celebrates a concept of humans as beings who go it alone, fierce, brave, courageous without even thinking about it, oozing strength from the nature of the best of the species. The story is told with incredible economy of words and description, yet nothing is sacrificed which drives home the power and inner strength of this man, who just takes it as what he does, what it is to be a serious fisherman. Hemingway’s world is not my world. I am no Santiago, no macho man. And the culture of today has little place left for the radical individual whom Hemingway celebrates and Santiago portrays. Yet the power of Hemingway’s telling is such that I couldn’t help but be on Santiago’s side, to admire him, to ache with his loss in the end to forces greater than he. There is a side tale as well. This great individual, the man who stands alone, is not alone completely by choice. He has developed a friendship, a working relationship, a love with a young boy who began fishing with him when the boy was only five. Now the boy has moved on to another boat, a more successful one, at his parents’ behest, but he pines to work with Santiago, and when the battle with the great fish has been engaged, Santiago pleads over and over and over: “I wish the boy were here.” Like many readers who might come upon this novel today, I live a life of citified ease and comfort. A life far removed from harsh confrontations with nature. But Hemingway forces me to remember and acknowledge the individual, the struggle for the most basic existence, the battle with nature for survival itself. But most importantly he makes one acknowledge the importance of the individual and the magnificence of courage, skill, art and endurance.

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