Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition

A LSO BY E RNEST H EMINGWAY

In Our Time

The Torrents of Spring

The Sun Also Rises

Men Without Women

A Farewell to Arms

Death in the Afternoon

Winner Take Nothing

Green Hills of Africa

To Have and Have Not

The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Across the River and Into the Trees

The Old Man and the Sea

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

A Moveable Feast

Islands in the Stream

The Nick Adams Stories

Selected Letters 19171961

On Writing

The Dangerous Summer

Dateline: Toronto

The Garden of Eden

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

By-Line: Ernest Hemingway

True at First Light

Hemingway on Fishing

Hemingway on Hunting

Hemingway on War

A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition

The Sun Also Rises: The Hemingway Library Edition

Green Hills of Africa: The Hemingway Library Edition

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Hemingway Library Edition

For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition

Scribner

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1952 by Ernest Hemingway

Renewal copyright 1980 by Mary Hemingway

Hemingway Library Edition copyright 2020 by the Hemingway Copyright Owners

Foreword copyright 2020 by Patrick Hemingway

Introduction copyright 2020 by Sen Hemingway

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-4767-8784-8

ISBN 978-1-4767-8786-2 (ebook)

To Charlie Scribner and Max Perkins

In his treatise On the Nature of Things, the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius once wrote: Life is one long struggle in the dark. What I think he meant by that is there is so much that we do not know. My own education began in many ways during the summers of my youth in Key West, Bimini, and Cuba, especially at Finca Viga, with my father, who was a wonderful teacher. Cuba and the Gulf Stream then were like an Eden for me, and returning to boarding school always felt like being sent into exile from paradise. Fishing trips with Papa aboard the Pilar in pursuit of marlin, exploring the sea by snorkeling with some of the first single-lens goggle glasses, and the trove of natural history books in my fathers library awakened me to the world in all of its beauty and complexity. In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago knows about lifes strugglehe has fished for eighty-four days without a catch. He is not, however, entirely in the dark. In my view, a great achievement of this novel is how my father, drawing on his own formidable experience and talent, managed to create for us the world of the Gulf Stream so completely. It is a powerful evocation of a precious ecosystem, one sadly undergoing terrible changes today due to human intervention, and one very much worth protecting.

In a fascinating twist of history, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrdinger and Ernest Hemingway died in the same year. Over the course of their lives both men made great contributions to their chosen professions, each achieving a Nobel Prize, one in physics, the other in literature. Perhaps the most memorable of the Austrian physicists thought experiments was Schrdingers cata creature both dead and alive at the same time. It was a way for him to explain the duality of conditions that can coexist in quantum physics. Schrdinger imagined a cat in a closed box with a deadly poisonone would not know if the cat was dead or alive and so it would, in a sense, be both. Part of the mythic power of The Old Man and the Sea is something that I would call Hemingways cat. A seemingly impossible feat is made possible through my fathers storytelling: an old man alone in a skiff on the sea manages to bring in a fish weighing over a thousand pounds.

Patrick Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea is arguably the greatest fishing story of all time. It ranks, in my opinion, above Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick as the most marvelous piscatorial contribution of American literature. It is a timeless storymythic, archetypalbut it is also of its time. Like the whaling industry of nineteenth-century America captured so poignantly in Moby-Dick, the practice of Cuban commercial fishermen setting out in small sailing skiffs for large billfish, using only hand tackle, is now largely a thing of the past with the advent of motorboats and modern fishing equipment.

Fishing has been a part of human experience for thousands of years and this story reminds us of its importance. Part of the joy of reading The Old Man and the Sea is the portrayal of the act of fishing itself, as anyone who has held a hand line or a rod with a fish tugging on it will understand. Fishing, for those of us who practice it, is one of lifes great pleasures. I am forever grateful to my father for introducing me at a young age to the wonders of fishing, as his father had done for him. The notion of passing on this knowledge from generation to generation, which is expressed so beautifully in the novella through the friendship of Santiago and the young boy, is an important aspect of the story.

How did Ernest Hemingway come to write this masterpiece? The Old Man and the Sea had a long period of gestation. In 1936 Hemingway described the essence of the story in an article he wrote for Esquire magazine entitled On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter, included as the first appendix to this book. It was a tale told to him by Carlos Gutirrez, a Cuban fisherman who taught my grandfather much about big-game fishing (see 3). Hemingways passion for deep-sea fishing began much earlier, though, and it was through his determination to master the sport that he acquired a wealth of detailed knowledge enabling him to write the novella many years later.