MEYERS: Which is fantastic for simply one title more than 50 years ago. And the book still sells about $100,000 worth of books a year abroad. MEYERS: The novel is written in extremely and deliberately simple style and it's still used for that reason to teach English in foreign countries. STAMBERG: What can you tell us about the writing of Old Man and the Sea? Where was he when he wrote it? How much of a struggle did he have with it? STAMBERG: But these most famous books, really, the books that made his career, The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, they were years earlier, weren't they? So he was trying to make a comeback with The Old Man and the Sea, and the book, in fact, was a tremendous success. It came out in 1950 and it got a very negative response from the critics.

MEYERS: His previous book to this was Across the River and Into the Trees, which was the first book he published after World War Two. STAMBERG: Ernest Hemingway was 52 when he wrote it. STAMBERG: Thanks for talking with us, Mr. The book begins this way.ĬHARLTON HESTON: He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf stream and he'd gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. Hemingway's story of the struggle between a weather-beaten Cuban fisherman and a giant marlin won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The book was The Old Man and the Sea, published first in a single issue of Life magazine. Hemingway wrote his publisher that he had just finished a short novel that was, quote, The best I can write ever for all of my life. Fifty-four years ago today, on March 4, 1952, Mr.

Ernest Hemingway once said, Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

The old man and the sea book cover