The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway, 1952
Contemporary fiction Literary fiction
An old Cuban fisherman, eighty-four days without a fish, rows out alone and hooks something enormous. The spare, plain prose moves slowly and steadily, carrying a quiet awe at the sea and a steady awareness of death.
Feels like awe and serenity. About nature and death.
Who it’s for
You may like this if you enjoy quiet, patient stories about solitary work and the natural world. Much of it is one man alone with his thoughts and the sea, so the middle can feel slow and repetitive.
Why read it
It gives you a compact, clear-eyed look at endurance and respect for the sea, with plain prose that leaves room for your own thoughts.
A page from the book
The difference between calling the sea a woman and calling it an enemy.
He always thought of the sea as la mar, which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines or had motorboats bought when the shark lovers had much money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine, they spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine, as something that gave or withheld great favors. If she did wild or wicked things, it is because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought. Ernest Hemingway.Hemingway wrote the book in Cuba and Bimini in 1951; it ran in full in a single issue of Life, which sold over five million copies in two days.
Books that feel like this
More by Ernest Hemingway
A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway, 1964
Hemingway's posthumous memoir of 1920s Paris: cheap oysters, cold wine, Cézanne in the Luxembourg, and the making of a writer.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway, 1940
An American dynamiter has days to blow a mountain bridge and has just fallen in love, in a war where every stranger's death is your own.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Old Man and the Sea for me?
- You may like this if you enjoy quiet, patient stories about solitary work and the natural world. Much of it is one man alone with his thoughts and the sea, so the middle can feel slow and repetitive.
- What is The Old Man and the Sea like?
- The spare, plain prose moves slowly and steadily, carrying a quiet awe at the sea and a steady awareness of death. Feels like awe and serenity. About nature and death.
- What should I read after The Old Man and the Sea?
- If you liked The Old Man and the Sea, try The Call of the Wild (Jack London), The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel) and The Covenant (James Michener).
A taste of the feed
To be five years old and understand that nobody is coming.
The child was alone in a wilderness of grassy steppes and scattered forests. Glaciers spanned the continent on the north, pushing their cold before them. Untold numbers of grazing animals, and the carnivores that preyed on them, roamed the vast prairies, but people were few. She had nowhere to go and she had no one who would come and look for her. She was alone.
The Clan of the Cave Bear · Jean M. Auel
What forty-three looks like when the land writes itself on a face.
Gumsto was typical of his clan, four feet ten inches high, yellowish brown in color, thin and extremely wrinkled. Indeed, there were few areas of his body that did not contain deep indentations, and sometimes within a square inch twelve lines would run up and down, with eight or nine crisscrossing them. His face looked like the map of a very old watershed, marked by the trails of a thousand animals, and when he smiled, showing small white teeth, these wrinkles cut deeper into his countenance, making him look as if he were well past ninety. He was forty-three and his wrinkles had been with him since the age of twenty-two; they were the mark of his people.
The Covenant · James Michener
The last seed in the world, handed to someone who didn't ask.
Catch! calls the Once-ler. He lets something fall. It’s a Truffula Seed. It’s the last one of all! You’re in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds. And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs. Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.
The Lorax · Dr. Seuss
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