The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. In the first forty days a boy had been with him.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. First published in 1952, this hugely popular tale confirmed his power and presence in the literary world and played a large part in his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of adversity and personal triumph won from loss and transforms them into a magnificent twentieth-century classic. The story of a down-on-his-luck Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal-a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream-has been cherished by generations of readers. The last of his novels Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the most enduring works of American fiction.

It tells a fundamental human truth: in a volatile world, from our first breath to our last wish, through triumphs and pitfalls both trivial and profound, what sustains us, ultimately, is hope.” - The Guardian “A beautiful tale, awash in the seasalt and sweat, bait and beer of the Havana coast.

The old man and the sea author