Works by these authors, as well as those by F. Others included Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein with whom Hemingway was well acquainted. This is a term used to refer to Americans who moved to Europe after WWI. While there, he became part of the “lost generation” of writers. While Hemingway is almost always associated with Cuba, he also spent a good deal of time in Paris. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway Digital Art His writing career was at a low point, and he was relatively isolated from his contemporaries while living in Cuba.

Some scholars have also suggested that the solitude, struggle, and desperation that Santiago experiences in the novella mirror the same emotions in Hemingway’s life at the time he wrote the story. It was his exposure to the realities of life and death as well as his knowledge of the Cuban people that helped this novel become the success that it was and still is. He’d been part of the First World War as a war reporter and was even present on D-Day during WWII. Hemingway lived much more luxuriously than Santiago, the main character of The Old Man and the Sea, but he was well acquainted with hardship. He lived in Cuba for almost 20 years and became an important figure, well-known through Havana. It was the 1940s and he spent a great deal of time on the water, fishing off his boat The Pilar. During the period of time in which Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, he was living in Cuba. His direct style of writing is suited perfectly to the life and death situation that Santiago finds himself in. The story is moving, endearing, and emotional.

Climax: When Santiago finally catches the marlinĮrnest Hemingway and The Old Man and the SeaĮrnest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is one of his most popular novels.

Setting: 1940s, Cuban fishing village, the Gulf of Mexico.

Point-of-View: Third-person omniscient, mostly limited to Santiago.

He hooks an enormous marlin, the biggest he’s ever seen and the majority of the novella follows him trying to reel in this gigantic fish.

The story follows Santiago, a poor Cuban fisherman who is suffering from a long streak without successfully catching anything.

This short novella was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and is often cited as one of the defining factors (along with several near-death experiences) in Hemingway’s selection for the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway is the last of Hemingway’s great fiction books.

The old man and the sea book