Description
Reading Group Guide forThe Old Man and the SeaIntroductionErnest Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. After graduation from high school, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he worked briefly for theKansas City Star.Failing to qualify for the United States Army because of poor eyesight, he enlisted with the American Red Cross to drive ambulances in Italy. He was severely wounded on the Austrian front on July 9, 1918. Following recuperation in a Milan hospital, he returned home and became a freelance writer for theToronto Star.In December of 1921, he sailed to France and joined an expatriate community of writers and artists in Paris while continuing to write for theToronto Star.There his fiction career began in "little magazines" and small presses and led to a volume of short stories,In Our Time(1925). His novelsThe Sun Also Rises(1926) andA Farewell to Arms(1929) established Hemingway as the most important and influential fiction writer of his generation. His later collections of short stories andFor Whom the Bell Tolls(1940) affirmed his extraordinary career while his highly publicized life gave him unrivaled celebrity as a literary figure.Hemingway became an authority on the subjects of his art: trout fishing, bullfighting, big-game hunting, and deep-sea fishing, and the cultures of the regions in which he set his work -- France, Italy, Spain, Cuba, and Africa.The Old Man and the Sea(1952) earned him the Pulitzer Prize and was instrumental in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954. Hemingway died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.DescriptionSantiago, an old Cuban fisherman who has not caught a fish for eighty-four days, goes far out to sea in his skiff alone because the young boy Manolin, who has fished with him and served him in the past, is prevented from continuing to do so by his parents, who are convinced that the old man hassalao,bad luck. Santiago kills a giant marlin after fighting it for three days, lashes it alongside his skif