This Day in History...
What American high school student hasn't at one time found The Old Man and the Sea on his English class syllabus? In an effort to understand the meaning behind the story, most of these same high school students read the annotated notes, which were usually longer than the book itself. Ernest Hemingway won a Pulitzer Prize for the book in 1953, and a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 — the latter, for the body of his work, but especially for his novella about a fisherman who struggles to bring in a giant marlin.
Hemingway, who was born on this date in 1899, said of the meaning behind the tale, "There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse... What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."
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The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them." — Ernest Hemingway