Santiago catches the fish, but it gets eaten by sharks and it's implied he dies at the end. Broken Ace: The last book Hemingway ever saw published himself was also fittingly his last bittersweet reconstruction of his philosophy of manhood.Bittersweet Ending: Santiago still caught his fish, and he promises his apprentice that they will be able to work together again, however he lost his catch to the sharks and it's left ambiguous as to how truthful he is he may well soon be dead.Author Appeal: Santiago really likes baseball.The Old Man and the Sea provides examples of: It was adapted into a 1958 film starring Spencer Tracy, an Academy Award-winning 1999 Russian cartoon by Aleksandr Petrov, and a 1990 miniseries with Anthony Quinn.

It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and pretty much sealed the deal on Hemingway's 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. Defeated, the old man walks home and collapses in bed (although it can still be a moral victory, since he's proved that he can still catch fish).ĭue to the symbolism, relatively easy prose and short length, The Old Man and the Sea is a mainstay of high school English courses, and is perhaps one of the most widely-read books in the United States (at least for people under thirty). Unfortunately, it is eaten by sharks, despite the old man's valiant effort to fight them off. He lashes it to the side of his boat and tries to take it home to sell. He goes out to sea where he hooks a giant marlin, which he fights day and night, eventually catching it. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.'Ī 1952 novella by Ernest Hemingway that tells the story of a poor Cuban fisherman of Spanish origins named Santiago who has not caught a fish in several months.

The old man and the sea story