Life & Background
Hemingway was born in a Chicago suburb in 1899 and went straight from high school to newspaper work at the Kansas City Star, whose style guide — short sentences, vigorous English — he credited for the rest of his life. He served as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in 1918 and was badly wounded at eighteen, the experience behind A Farewell to Arms. In 1920s Paris he belonged to the expatriate circle around Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and it was Stein's remark that gave The Sun Also Rises its 'lost generation' epigraph. He reported the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, lived in Key West and Cuba, married four times, and cultivated a public persona of bullfighting, big-game hunting, and deep-sea fishing. He received the Nobel Prize in 1954 and died in Idaho in 1961.
The Old Man and the Sea
Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, has gone eighty-four days without a catch, and the boy Manolin, who loves him, has been made by his parents to fish in a luckier boat. Santiago rows far beyond the other boats and hooks an enormous marlin. The fish is stronger than the skiff and tows him for two days and nights; he holds the line across his back until his hands are cut and cramped, speaking to the fish, calling it his brother, and regretting that he must kill it. On the third day he brings it alongside and harpoons it, lashing it to the boat because it is too large to bring aboard. Sharks come for the blood trail. He fights them until his weapons are gone and the marlin is a skeleton. He carries the mast home, sleeps, and dreams of lions.
The novella is the clearest demonstration of what Hemingway called the iceberg theory or the theory of omission: the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water, and the writer may omit anything he truly knows without weakening the story. The prose is stripped to declarative sentences, concrete nouns, and coordinating conjunctions, with emotion carried by rhythm and by what is not said. Santiago's insistence that a man can be destroyed but not defeated is the fullest statement of the Hemingway code — grace under pressure, endurance without complaint — and the Christian imagery of the return, the carried mast and the wounded hands, is deliberate but unexplained.
Why Hemingway Matters
Hemingway's style reshaped English prose more completely than any twentieth-century writer's, and its influence runs through American fiction, journalism, and crime writing to the present. The lost generation, the code hero, and the iceberg theory are standard critical terms taken from his work. He is equally important as a case in gender criticism, where the masculine performance of the fiction and the persona has been read both as celebration and as anxious construction.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- In Our Time1925
- The Sun Also Rises1926
- A Farewell to Arms1929
- Death in the Afternoon1932
- For Whom the Bell Tolls1940
- The Old Man and the Sea1952
- A Moveable Feast1964