Ernest Hemingway might have picked up something from generations of anglers, because for his most impressive piece of work, he chose a fish story. By the 1950s, Hemingway had earned renown for novels like “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms,” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” But since 1940’s “Bell,” Hemingway had been mostly quiet on the literary front. The Illinois native had sunk into depression during the 1940s, as friends and fellow writers – expatriated Americans he had befriended while living in Paris in the 1920s, like Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald – died around him. An attempted comeback with 1950’s “Across the River and into the Trees” was a dud.

In response, Hemingway churned out the draft of another book over an eight-week period in 1951. He called it “The Old Man and the Sea,” and is believed to have finished it 63 years ago on March 4, 1952. At least, that’s the date he sent off a message to his publisher about the book, in which he called it “the best I can write ever for all of my life." Readers and critics agreed. The book made Hemingway an international celebrity when it was released in 1952, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953. Hemingway himself won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, and “The Old Man and the Sea” was cited as part of the reason.

True to Hemingway’s style, the book avoids overwrought language as it describes the Cuban fisherman Santiago and his epic battle with a giant marlin in the Gulf Stream. Hemingway was known for a sparse writing style, perhaps following an observation by Henry James that World War I had “used up words.” (Hemingway had seen action on the Western Front before being seriously injured, and explored the idea that words were useless to explore the war in 1929’s “A Farewell to Arms.”)

While the story of Santiago and the marlin seems simple, it has been interpreted as rife with symbolism. (Hemingway said a good writer should leave much of what he knows unsaid…similar to an iceberg, which keeps most of its power submerged.) In its glorification of struggle, the book has been called a biblical allegory, with allusions to the Crucifixion, as well as an oblique commentary on Hemingway’s entire literary career. And all of this could be true…or it could just be that, under the right conditions, everything you need to know about life can be summed up in a fishing trip.

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