The last decade of Ernest Hemingway's life was marked by
professional accomplishment and personal disaster. By his
fifties, a life of hard living and hard drinking began to catch
up with him. His ailments included liver problems, diabetes,
depression and the lingering physical damage related to his many
injuries. Hemingway had endured a lifelong streak of freak
accidents, from that skylight accident in Paris to the time his
infant son stuck his finger in his eye and tore his cornea. In
1954, while on safari with Mary in Africa, the couple was
seriously injured in two successive plane crashes (the plane
that came to rescue them after the first crash crashed as well).
He was recovering from those injuries at the same time that his
literary career and personal fame reached its peak. In September
1952, Life magazine published Hemingway's novella The Old Man
and the Sea. The book focuses on Santiago, a weathered, quiet,
long-suffering Cuban fisherman who spends days at sea wrestling
with a marlin, only to see the