The Old Man and His Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Cuba, Ernest Hemingway's haven for writing literature, fishing for marlin and basking in it's tropical weather. Cuba played a key role in Hemingway's life and literature. He spent many days and nights writing famous lines and passages for his well known novels such as Old Man in the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Islands in the Stream.
Born Ernest Miller Hemingway on July 21, 1899, he was the sixth child of Dr. Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway. He was named after his maternal grandfather Ernest Hall and his great uncle Miller Hall. His love for Cuba can be linked to his childhood summer home, which surrounded Lake Michigan, where his father taught him the skills of hunting and fishing. (Heritage in Cuba P. 1)
Hemingway first touched Cuban soil in route to Key West in 1928 with his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. Hemingway's attraction to this small island was intense and immediate and there would be many trips to follow. Hemingway would eventually make Cuba one of his many homes. (Baker, 1969, P. 191)
His first real visit to Cuba came in 1932 on a planned fishing trip with his old friend Joe Russell, the owner of the famous "Sloppy Joe's" located in Key West. They arrived in Cuba aboard Russell's cabin cruiser, the Anita, for a "two week" vacation that lasted for over two months. Hemingway settled himself at the Ambos Mundos Hotel, a place that proved to be an ideal place to complete his novel A Way You'll Never Be. Even though writing was his first priority, Hemingway's love for the sport of marlin fishing was a constant competitor, the later would be his link to Cuba (P. 228) .
Ernest Hemingway often modeled his fictional characters after his close friends. Jan...
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... mental breakdowns, two trips to the Mayo Clinic and shock treatments that eventually damaged his memory and put a stop to his writing, he committed suicide on July 2, 1961 (Meyers, 1985, 559,560). Coincidentally, his father had committed suicide in the exact same way as Hemingway, a single shot to the head. Hemingway's mental illness was in his genetic makeup and would continue with his offspring.
After Hemingway's death, Castro took possession of his home and his boat. Mary was quoted as saying "I had a phone call in Ketchum from the Cuban government asking me whether I would consent to donate our home in Cuba as a museum. In exchange I would be allowed to remove all the papers from the Bank and my personal belongings." (P.566) Hemingway died loving Cuba, so it is appropriate that The Hemingway Museum would be a lasting tribute to this "Old Man and His Sea."
1946-(September) Charlie Luciano goes to Cuba and stays at the Hotel Nacional. He is there for an important meeting with all the major mob members to discuss Siegel’s future.
Santiago is an old fisherman who lives in a small coast town in Cuba. At the time that Hemingway wrote the story, he was also an elderly gentlemen and was such an avid fisherman throughout his life, that books such as "Ernest Hemingway, The Angler As Artist” were written on the sole subject of how this obsession influenced Hemingway's writing. Furthermore, he fished off the coast of Cuba so much that he decided to "buy the 'Finca Vigia' in Cuba, a substantial estate located about fifteen miles from downtown Havana . . .” For entertainment Santiago would "read the baseball." Meanwhile Hemingway often "relied on baseball analogies” in his writing, suggesting that he also loved the game. These similarities between Santiago's lifestyle and Hemingway's cannot be ignored or passed off as coincidence because they are much too precise. Already, from these prominent identical traits it is evident that Hemingway modeled the character of Santiago after his own person.
In the early 1900’s, Cuba was a stomping ground for many of the rich and famous from the United States. Many famous movies stars and wealthy business entrepreneurs spend their vacations there along with a substantial amount of money. Trade and commerce between the United States and Cuba flowed freely and abundantly. Even with the Dictatorship-like regime of Batista, the countries benefited from the economic trade between them. This was all about to come crashing down as revolts against Batista occurred and Fidel Castro came to power within Cuba.
Current leader and dictator of Cuba, Fidel Castro, was born on August 13, 1926 in Biran Cuba. As a child, Fidel Castro had a good life because his father was very wealthy. His fathers name was Angel Castro. He was very wealthy because he owned plantations and lands. Additionally, he was originally from Spain but then moved to Cuba. Angel Castro married to Lina Gonzalez. Fidel Castro had one brother named Raul Castro. Fidel And Raul always had a special bond between their brother relationship therefore, this relationship carried on as they grew older.
Fidel Castro was born on August 13, 1926 in Buran, Cuba to the parent’s foreigners Angel, and Lina Castro Ruz. He is the son of a successful sugar cane planter. Fidel Castro was known for his athletic skill and for his smarts. He went to the school for and started studying under the law career at the University of Havana. In 1946, he had been in a few newspapers because of his speeches, and a year later Castro joined the socialist Party of the Cuban People.
Celia Cruz was born on October 21, 1925 in a working-class neighborhood of Santos Suarez in Havana, Cuba. Celia Cruz was a Cuban-American singer, best known as one of the most popular salsa performers of all time. She was the second of four children. Her father, Simon Cruz, was a railroad stoker and her mother, Catalina Alfonso was a homemaker who took care of the extended family of fourteen. Celia Cruz grew up in a poor neighborhood in Santos Suarez, where Cuba’s diverse musical climate became a growing influence.
Ernest returned home to Cuba to wait for his future wife Mary Welsh, who he had met in Paris. They got married in 1946, but that year contained a lot of turmoil for Ernest and his family. When the Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952 that marked the end of his career. In 1954 Hemingway was honored with theNobel Prize for Literature, from then on everything went down hill (lib.utexas.edu)
Growing up in a rich atmosphere of culture, religion, and the sciences, Ernest Hemingway was always surrounded by different perspectives and thoughts of the world around him. There was a restlessness in him that wanted to discover and explore new things. Beginning as early as high school, his inner-writer began to emerge and his stories were often read aloud to the class as examples of what the other students should strive for. These stories are rarely spoken of nowadays, but display his early talent. While the majority of people are mostly familiar with Hemingway’s well-known works in his later years, some of his earliest pieces that he contributed to the world are often forgotten. (Reef 53).
A legendary novelist, short-story writer and essayist Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in the village of Oak Park, Illinois, close to the prairies and woods west of Chicago. His mother Grace Hall had an operatic career before marrying Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway. While growing up, the young Hemingway spent lots of his time hunting and fishing with his physician father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, and learned about the ways of music with his mother, who was a musician and artist. He was the second of Clarence and Grace Hemingway's six children. He was raised in a strict Protestant community that tried as hard as possible to be separate themselves from the big city of Chicago, though they were very close geographically. Both parents and their nearby families fostered the Victorian priorities of the time: religion, family, work and discipline. They followed the Victorians' elaborate sentimental style in living and writing. He attended school in the Oak Park Public School system and in high school, Hemingway played sports and wrote for the school newspaper. At Oak Park and River Forest High School, Ernest reported and wrote articles, poems and stories for the school's publications largely based on his direct experiences. Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was unable to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm, because he was recuperating from injuries sustained in an airplane crash while hunting in Uganda. In July, 1961, he ended his life in Ketchum, Idaho.
There are many authors in this world, but there are also many legends. Legends who changed the face of literature. One of these legends was none other than Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21st, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. He was born to a physician and former opera performer named Clarence and Grace. Hemingway showed a talent in writing when he was in high school. He wrote for the school’s newspaper and yearbook. After he graduated at the age of 17 in 1916, he began his writing career as a reporter for a newspaper called, the Kansas City Star. After he worked as a reporter for six months, he dropped out because he wanted to join the U.S army during World War I. But because he failed the medical test, he joined the American Field Service Ambulance Corps in Italy. Unfortunately, while he was delivering supplies, Hemingway was wounded, which ended his career as an ambulance driver. Because of this, he spent lots of time in hospitals and met a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky, with whom he fell in love with. Sadly, she didn’t return his feelings so Hemingway was heartbroken. This incident inspired him to write one of his well known books, “A Farewell to Arms”. Like this book, many other of his famous works came to be because of incidents in his past. His pieces of literature started to be known and read worldwide which provided him a route to become one of the most celebrated authors of his time.
Ernest Hemingway was a man whose writing could be summed up as minimalistic and dynamic. While his stories at first glance seem simple, they are deceptively so. He wrote sharp, deliberate dialogue with exact descriptions of places and things. A postmodernist icon, Hemingway broke chronology in his stories and nudged towards the idea of multiple truths. In his story, "In Another Country" he uses both of these postmodern techniques. By effectively using fewer words than his contemporaries to deliver works that resonated stronger with his audience, Ernest Hemmingway earned his place as one of the great postmodernists of the twentieth century.
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero, Illinois. Clarence and Grace Hemingway raised Ernest in the suburbs of Chicago and Northern Michigan. He spent most of his young years with his father, where he learned things that are necessary for a “man” to know. This included hunting, fishing, and appreciating the outdoors (“Early Years” 1). This being the origin of his notion that to be a man, you must follow masculine stereotypes.
Ernest Hemingway is today known as one of the most influential American authors of the 20th century. This man, with immense repute in the worlds of not only literature, but also in sportsmanship, has cast a shadow of control and impact over the works and lifestyles of enumerable modern authors and journalists. To deny his clear mastery over the English language would be a malign comparable to that of discrediting Orwell or Faulkner. The influence of the enigma that is Ernest Hemingway will continue to be shown in works emulating his punctual, blunt writing style for years to come.
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899. He was a writer who started his career with a newspaper office in Kansas City when he was seventeen. When the United States got involved in the First World War, Hemingway joined with a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. During his service, he was wounded, and was decorated by the Italian Government. Upon his return to the United States, he was employed by Canadian and American newspapers as a reporter, and sent back to Europe to cover the Greek Revolution. In the 1920’s, Hemingway was a member of expatriate Americans in Paris. In one writing of Hemingway, it reads, “In the nearly sixty two years of his life that followed he forged a literary reputation unsurpassed in the twentieth century” (LostGeneration). During this time, he wrote some of his most important and successful works of literature. Ernest Hemingway is one of the most influential writers of his time. One biography of him said, “His novels and short fictions have left an indelible mark on the literary production of the United States and the world” (TheEuropeanGraduateSchool).
Hemingway has a way of making his readers believe that the feats and strengths that his characters obtain in his novels are actually possible. Although this statement may be too critical, and maybe there is a man out there, somewhere on the coast of Cuba who at this very moment is setting out to the open sea to catch a marlin of his own. The struggle many readers have is believing the story of Santiago’s physical powers and his strength against temptation bring forward the question of whether or not The Old Man and the Sea is worthy to be called a classic. Hemingway’s Santiago brought Faulkner and millions of other readers on their knees, while to some, believed Hemingway had swung his third strike. As we look further into Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, we can analyze the criticism and complications of the character Santiago. He is portrayed as a faulty Jesus, an unrealistic and inhuman man, and again still a hero to those who cannot find happiness in their life.