The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

How did I get to this age never having read Hemingway? I may have touched on a lone short story included somewhere in an anthology, but nothing reaching the magnitude of this novella. The biblical Book of Job retold as a fish tale. Indeed, Hemingway has written what would have happened if Job had gone to sea in an attempt to earn a new living as a fisherman. The patience! The pureness of spirit! The continuation of hope! Hemingway's Job is actually Santiago, an aging mid-20th-century Cuban fisherman, a simple and hard-working man who follows baseball and admires the great DiMaggio. The language of the story is equally simple and hardworking.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

Throughout the 92-page Scribner Classics edition I read - with illustrations! - Hemingway remains true to the spare prose promise of that first sentence. And yet we never feel a lack of information. On the contrary, readers may feel a need to massage a hand cramp after the old man spends his first night gripping the line on which he has hooked an as yet unseen giant marlin. Many will feel as parched for a drink of water as when they read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This brief masterpiece draws readers in and involves them in the story.

Published in 1952 it received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and was specifically mentioned when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.