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Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is a fictional novella, the shortest of Hemingway's stand-alone books. In fact, it was published both as a novella and in an edition of Life magazine on September 1st, 1952: the 5 million copies of Life sold out in 2 days. The Old Man and the Sea was well-regarded by critics and popular audiences alike. The novella won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was mentioned specifically in the citation of the Nobel Prize for Literature that Hemingway won in 1954.
The story, often considered a parable, belongs to the literary tradition of Modernism. It also belongs to a tradition of man-in-nature stories, where an isolated individual engages in a life-or-death battle against Mother Nature and the elements. The Old Man and the Sea, however, is as much about Santiago's relationship with the natural world as it is about conflict.
There are many autobiographical elements to the story, as Hemingway was an avid deep-sea fisherman. One of the biggest marlins Hemingway ever fought was attacked by sharks as it was reeled in, losing "nearly half of its meat." A letter Hemingway wrote after the incident documented this fact, among others. While it is hard to imagine that Hemingway did not draw on this real-life experience when writing The Old Man and the Sea, the story is not auto-fiction per se.
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