Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea"

Ernest Hemingway 1939

On this date in 1952, Earnest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea was first published. The first draft of the short novel was written by Hemingway in eight weeks. It would become his most famous work. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 for his work.

The Old Man and the Sea tells the story of an aging fisherman's struggle with a giant marlin and his friendship with a young villager boy.

The novel has been adapted for the screen in a 1958 film starring Spencer Tracy and a 1990 television miniseries starring Anthony Quinn.

It is often included in high school American Literature curriculums.

Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. Often called Papa, Hemingway's dynamic personality would lead him to many adventures. He served in the military during World War I and as a war correspondent in World War II.

Hemingway married four times and traveled around the world maintaining residences in Venice, Paris, and Cuba. After leaving Cuba, he bought a home in Ketchum, Idaho where after battling years of physical ailments and alcoholism, he took his life on July 2, 1961.

An inscription on a memorial to Ernest Hemingway just North of Sun Valley reads:

Best of all he loved the fall

the leaves yellow on cottonwoods

leaves floating on trout streams

and above the hills

the high blue windless skies

Now he will be a part of them forever.