Ernest Hemingway completes his short novel The Old Man and the
Sea. He wrote his publisher the same day, saying he had finished
the book and that it was the best writing he had ever done. The
critics agreed: The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and
became one of his bestselling works. The novella, which was
first published in Life magazine, was an allegory referring to
the writer's own struggles to preserve his art in the face of
fame and attention. Hemingway had become a cult figure whose
four marriages and adventurous exploits in big-game hunting and
fishing were widely covered in the press. But despite his fame,
he had not produced a major literary work in a decade before he
wrote The Old Man and the Sea. The book would be his last
significant work of fiction before his suicide in 1961.
Hemingway, born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, started working
as a reporter for the Kansas City Star in 1917. When World War I
broke out, he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red
Cross and was severely wounded