Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea to prove he wasn’t finished as a writer.
When The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952, Hemingway hadn’t written a significant literary work for over a decade. His last successful book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, came out in 1940. To make matters worse, his 1950 novel Across the River and Into the Trees was panned by critics. People were saying that Hemingway was "through" as a writer. He began The Old Man and the Sea to prove that not only was he still in the writing game, he had yet to produce his best work.
Ernest Hemingway claimed there was no symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea.
The fable-like structure of the novel suggests that the story is symbolic, which is why many view The Old Man and the Sea as an allegory. But Hemingway thought all that was bunk—or at least, that’s what he said. "There isn’t any symbolism," he wrote to critic Bernard Berenson. "The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man … The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."
Hemingway believed The Old Man and the Sea was his finest work.
When Hemingway sent the manuscript to his editor, Wallace Meyer, he said, "I know that it is the best I can write ever for all of my life, I think, and that it destroys good and able work by being placed alongside of it." Then he added that he hoped it would "get rid of the school of criticism that I am through as a writer."
The Old Man and the Sea made Ernest Hemingway a celebrity.
Hemingway was a known and respected author beforehand, but The Old Man and the Sea elevated his reputation to the literary giant we think of today. Critics loved the book. It won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and was cited as a reason Hemingway won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was also a bestseller and made Hemingway a fortune. In 1955, it was made into a movie starring Spencer Tracy.
Even Ernest Hemingway’s literary rival, William Faulkner, liked The Old Man and the Sea.
Faulkner wrote a one-paragraph review of The Old Man and the Sea, published in Shenandoah:
"His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries. This time, he discovered God, a Creator. Until now, his men and women had made themselves, shaped themselves out of their own clay; their victories and defeats were at the hands of each other, just to prove to themselves or one another how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It’s all right. Praise God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me kept him from touching it any further."
A stop-motion film of The Old Man and the Sea won an Oscar.
A stop-motion animation of The Old Man and the Sea was made by Russian animator Aleksandr Petrov. The film uses 29,000 images that he and his son, Dimitri, painted on glass over two years. It’s no wonder it won the 2000 Academy Award for Animated Short Film.