The Old Man and the Sea
Santiago is an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. The boy Manolin, who once worked with him and learned the trade at his side, has been moved by his parents to a luckier boat. On the eighty-fifth day, alone, Santiago rows farther into the Gulf Stream than he has ever gone and hooks a marlin so large it tows his skiff for two days and nights, beyond the sight of land. The fight that follows, between an exhausted old man and a fish whose eye he eventually meets at the surface, is the spine of Ernest Hemingway's last great work of fiction, published in 1952 and credited the following year with the Pulitzer Prize and his Nobel laureate citation. The novella is at once a piece of pure marine adventure and a stripped-down meditation on craft, loyalty, and what it means to be defeated without being destroyed.
What you might want to know about The Old Man and the Sea
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without a catch and has lost his apprentice Manolin to another boat. On the eighty-fifth morning, he rows alone far into the Gulf Stream and hooks a marlin bigger than his skiff. The fight stretches across three days and nights.
Yes. The Old Man and the Sea won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Ernest Hemingway received the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Nobel committee specifically cited The Old Man and the Sea.
No. The Old Man and the Sea is one of the shortest novels in the American literary canon (around 100 pages) and is widely considered Ernest Hemingway's most accessible work. It is often a high-school first encounter with his style.
The Old Man and the Sea is 132 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Old Man and the Sea takes most readers 2 to 3 hours to finish.
The Old Man and the Sea is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Old Man and the Sea is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
