On March 4, 1952, the American writer Ernest Hemingway writes a letter to his publisher at the Charles Scribner’s Sons company announcing that he has finished the novella on which he has been working for more than three years: “This is the prose by the one I’ve been working on all my life that should read easily and simply and feel short but having all the dimensions of the visible world and the spiritual world of a man. It’s the best prose I’ve written so far.”
After six months, on September 8, 1952, the publisher published the first edition of said novel, entitled The Old Man and the Sea, the following year it appeared in Life magazine. It was the last great work of fiction by the writer from Illinois who received the Pulitzer Prize that same year.
The work would be his passport to the Nobel, just one year later on October 28, 1954, the Swedish Academy would grant him the precious award “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence it has exerted on contemporary style”, in the words of the jury.
