The Old Man and The Sea - Background and Publication

Background and Publication

Written in 1951, and published in 1952, The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's final work published during his lifetime. The book, dedicated to Hemingway's literary editor Maxwell Perkins, was featured in Life magazine on September 1, 1952, and five million copies of the magazine were sold in two days. The Old Man and the Sea also became a Book of the Month selection, and made Hemingway a celebrity. Published in book form on September 1, 1952, the first edition print run was 50,000 copies. The novel received the Pulitzer Prize in May, 1952, and was specifically cited when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. The success of The Old Man and the Sea made Hemingway an international celebrity. The Old Man and the Sea is taught at schools around the world and continues to earn foreign royalties.

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.

Hemingway wanted to use the story of the old man, Santiago, to show the honor in struggle and to draw biblical parallels to life in his modern world. Possibly based on the character of Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway had initially planned to use Santiago's story, which became The Old Man and the Sea, as part of an intimacy between mother and son and also the fact of relationships that cover most of the book relate to the Bible, which he referred to as "The Sea Book." (He also referred to the Bible as the "Sea of Knowledge" and other such things.) Some aspects of it did appear in the posthumously published Islands in the Stream. Hemingway mentions the real life experience of an old fisherman almost identical to that of Santiago and his marlin in On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter (Esquire, April 1936).