A lot of Pulitzer winners have faded over time, but this is not the case at all for Ernest Hemingway and The Old Man and the Sea, his 1952 novella, which finally won him the elusive prize.
Many people believe that Hemingway won because he hadn’t been recognized by the Pulitzer Board yet, and that he would have been better served by awarding one of his previous, more well-regarded novels. So while no one disputes Hemingway’s place in the Pulitzer family of authors, there is debate about whether The Old Man and the Sea itself is worthy.
Further complicating matters, Hemingway had been chosen for the Pulitzer Prize for his 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, but no prize was given that year (more on that in a future Pulitzer Deep Dive).
So how did one of the most famous and celebrated American authors almost make it through his career without winning a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? And is it true that The Old Man and the Sea represents nothing more than a makeup prize?
Snapshot: 1952
Let’s set the mood by looking at what was going on in the world in 1952, the year The Old Man and the Sea was published.
In bookstores:
The bestselling book of 1952 (according to Publishers Weekly) was The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain, an absolute forgotbuster (something that was popular in its time but no one remembers anymore). This is even more mysterious because The Silver Chalice was the second-best-selling book of the following year. Wild. In second place was the previous year’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk. Rounding out the top five, and proving that this was a pretty good year for books, was East of Eden by John Steinbeck, My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier, and Steamboat Gothic by Fances Parkinson Keyes. The Old Man and the Sea came in seventh.
In terms of book prizes, the National Book Award for Fiction went to Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to François Mauriac of France “for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life.”
In movies:
The highest-grossing movie of 1952 was The Greatest Show on Earth, a large-scale movie ostensibly about the inner workings of a circus starring Charlton Heston. I’ve seen it because it won the Best Picture Oscar the following year, and I think it’s terrible. It’s barely even a movie, it’s just a long ad for the circus. But clearly, audiences and critics loved the spectacle of it in 1952. Maybe it doesn’t help that when I was a kid, large-scale circuses like the one depicted in The Greatest Show on Earth were extremely commonplace. It wasn’t something new or exciting to me.
In the news:
On February 6, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned following the death of her father, King George VI. She stayed in that position for 70 years and 214 days. The Winter Olympics were held in Oslo, Norway. In June, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl was published in an English translation for the first time. In July, Eva Peron, also known as “Evita,” passed away at the age of 33. And in November, Dwight D. Eisenhower won the Presidential election over Adlai Stevenson. This is particularly notable because Eisenhower had been acting as the President of Columbia University, which facilitates the Pulitzer Prizes, and winning the election caused him to officially vacate his post at Columbia.
What Is The Old Man and the Sea About?
The Old Man and the Sea is a novella, and a slim one at that (you might say you could dunk it in your coffee), following Santiago, an aging fisherman who has not caught a fish in 84 days, which has others (and himself) wondering if he’s too old for this job that has defined so much of his life. So when he hooks a massive marlin on the 85th day of his losing streak, Santiago desperately holds onto it, even as it drags him further and further away from home. It’s not just a story of man against nature. It’s also man against the elements and, most importantly, man against himself. It’s also a bit about hubris, because after Santiago does catch the massive marlin, he’s allowed himself to get pulled so far away that his prize becomes bait for sharks as he hauls it back home. By the time he gets there, precious little is left (although there’s enough for the other fishermen to measure the marlin at 18 feet).
The novella is bookended by Santiago’s tender relationship with Manolin, a boy who had been trained by Santiago to be a fisherman. In the opening, Manolin’s parents have forced him to work on a different boat because they believe Santiago is bad luck, but Manolin still checks in on his grandfatherly mentor and helps him with his boat and equipment. At the end, Manolin cares for Santiago in his depleted state and pledges to accompany him in the future.
What Are the Themes of The Old Man and the Sea?
Despite the short page count, there is a lot going on thematically. Firstly, Santiago’s relationship with Manolin has a circle-of-life element to it. You may live long enough to see your legend fade away, but you can live on by nurturing the next generation. Santiago’s days as a fisherman may be ending (and so may soon his life), but Manolin’s are just beginning.
The obvious takeaway is that The Old Man and the Sea is a story about hard work and survival. Even as an old man facing a sustained losing streak, Santiago continues to get up early every day and head out to sea. There’s piety in this. Santiago has reverence for the unknowable, unforgiving sea. It is only Santiago’s pride that leads to his downfall (if you can call it such, since he did defeat the marlin). What I’m getting at is that there’s a lot of religious iconography underpinning the book’s most obvious message. Among these images is when Santiago carries his mast uphill after returning home at the novella’s end. Even someone who isn’t good at recognizing religious symbolism (like me) can probably guess that there are parallels to Christ carrying the cross.
On top of that, Santiago means “Saint James.” Saint James was an apostle who had been a fisherman. And not for nothing, Saint James is the patron saint of Spain, a country Ernest Hemingway loved and often wrote about.
Furthering the novella’s messaging with religious overtones, Santiago’s obsession with Joe DiMaggio and the Yankees reveals a lot in that Santiago believes in them even when they haven’t performed.
Add to all that the famous line, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
And all of this is before we get into the Ernest Hemingway of it all. The Old Man and the Sea is a pretty good stand-in for where Hemingway was in his life when this novella was published. There had been a ten-year gap between the publication of 1940’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (which has its own curious Pulitzer history that, again, I’ll get into at a later date) and 1950’s Across the River and Into the Trees, which received negative reviews. By many accounts, Hemingway was infuriated by the criticism of Across the River and Into the Trees, and many speculate that the sharks that tear Santiago’s marlin apart are meant to embody the critics who pull apart a writer’s work after the long, painful process of writing it. What we can say for sure is that at only age 52, Hemingway may well have felt that he was over the hill, and that couldn’t have been helped by critics announcing that Hemingway’s best work was long behind him. In that sense, he is Santiago: a long drought, people insinuating that he’s no longer capable, and a last desperate bid for relevance, or at least to prove to everyone else (not to mention himself) that he can still do it.
Unlike Santiago’s marlin, The Old Man and the Sea didn’t get torn to shreds by critics. It was released to waves of adoration. Not only did it claim the Pulitzer that Hemingway had been denied in 1940, but it also played a key role in winning him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. The Old Man in the Sea is specifically mentioned in the citation that announced Hemingway had won “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”
Why Did This Win a Pulitzer Prize?
I had believed that this would be a case where a notable author wins a Pulitzer for a later work as a sort of makeup prize acknowledging their great career. There are certainly people who do believe that–it is a fairly well-accepted belief that the only reason The Old Man and the Sea is a Pulitzer book is that Hemingway hadn’t already won.
But you know what? I genuinely liked The Old Man and the Sea. It’s a great book. It sounds rude to say this, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Prior to this, I had only read Hemingway’s short stories. And while I did like them a great deal, I think I bought into the notion that this was a career achievement prize more than a “legitimate” win. I don’t think that anymore. The Old Man and the Sea is a Pulitzer-worthy book in its own right.
I don’t think you can divorce Hemingway’s career from the win, though. He had been on the Pulitzer radar before, most significantly when For Whom the Bell Tolls came close to winning. Seriously: it was the book selected to win the Pulitzer Prize for 1940, but the President of Columbia University (and head of the Pulitzer Prizes), Nicholas M. Butler, vetoed the decision, calling For Whom the Bell Tolls offensive. Again, we’ll get into that story when I get around to doing a deep dive on that year, so stay tuned.
Anyway, even though he had gone a decade without publishing anything, Hemingway was an established literary titan. People loved his work and considered him one of the great American authors. A lot of people wanted Hemingway to succeed again. They wanted to celebrate his career and everything he had accomplished. The problem is that there were also people who seemed to take no small amount of glee in reporting that Hemingway was a has-been. This dynamic, the push-pull of wanting to reward Hemingway and wanting to delight in the idea that his career was dying, is why you can legitimately call the Pulitzer Prize awarded to The Old Man and the Sea a career achievement prize more than specific recognition for a great book.
But I think writing this off as a career achievement prize is reductive. Because The Old Man and the Sea is itself a very good book, and one that stands proudly with its fellow Pulitzer winners. Both of these things are true: Ernest Hemingway was overdue for a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and he really deserved to win for The Old Man and the Sea. Giving him a long-overdue prize for this novella doesn’t feel like a hollow gesture to me. It feels right.
I don’t think we can solve the debate over this book. The idea that Hemingway only won because he was long overdue is not going to go away, especially because I do think there’s a level of truth to it. But I do wish that The Old Man and the Sea didn’t get diminished as a result of this. It deserves better than that.
Besides, I think there’s a good chance that Hemingway would have won for The Old Man and the Sea even if he had won the prize that was taken away from For Whom the Bell Tolls. That would have made him one of the rare two-time Pulitzer winners in the fiction category. So I suggest we reframe the conversation away from dismissing The Old Man and the Sea as a lifetime achievement award and start talking about how Hemingway was denied two Pulitzer Prizes because the President of Columbia University threw a fit the first time around.
Who Is Ernest Hemingway?
Just be warned, Hemingway’s life has a very sad ending.
Odds are pretty good that you already know something of Ernest Hemingway, or at least that you’ve formed some opinion of him and his work. Hemingway is a sort of Teddy Roosevelt for the American literary scene: he’s as well known for his adventurous lifestyle as for the books he published, and he’s often discussed and portrayed in aggressively masculine ways. In fact, Hemingway’s association with masculinity (war, fighting, hunting, etc.) has earned him no small amount of criticism, especially from feminist literarians. You can credit the fact that there definitely is misogyny throughout Hemingway’s writing. Before reading The Old Man and the Sea, I had heard it dismissed as nothing more than a man wailing against impotence by at least two or three people. And look, that is a lens that somewhat fits, but only if you focus on impotence as something that can happen to men with age. I think it’s much more apt to say that this is a book about aging as a form of diminishment. You don’t need to insert phallic metaphors.
On the flip side, I’ve also heard readings of Hemingway that suppose the rampant manliness is more of a deflection. There isn’t hard evidence (no pun intended) that Hemingway was gay or bisexual, but speculation has cropped up. We do know that Hemingway had a transgender daughter named Gloria and that he struggled to understand his daughter. Gloria wrote about their relationship in Papa: A Memoir, a book I haven’t been able to track down yet but would love to read someday. Regarding Hemingway’s own sexuality, I recommend an article by Mikaella Clements in LitHub entitled “The Queerness of Ernest Hemingway.”
I do not wish to get into a debate about Hemingway’s masculinity (or otherwise). Suffice it to say that there are a lot of reductive opinions about Hemingway and his work out there, when the reality is much more complex and interesting.
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899. If you visit Oak Park today, there’s a Hemingway Museum as well as a museum set up in the home where Hemingway was born. After a six-month stint as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, Hemingway wanted to enlist to fight in WWI but was rejected for having poor eyesight. Instead, he volunteered for the Red Cross and became an ambulance driver. He was in Italy for a year before he went home after having been badly injured by shrapnel.
Hemingway married for the first time in 1921 and set off for Paris to work as a foreign correspondent. While there, he met Gertrude Stein, who became his mentor. Although their relationship deteriorated over time and became a literary quarrel lasting decades, Hemingway’s career is, in many ways, tied to Gertrude Stein. Her influence on him is inextricable from his work. During his formative time in Paris, Hemingway also spent time with James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Hemingway wrote about this time in his life in A Moveable Feast, which was published posthumously.
Hemingway moved to Key West, Florida with his second wife. You can visit the Hemingway House and its polydactyl (or six-toed) cats if you ever find yourself there.
I’m running long here, so I’ll just say that Hemingway quickly became a literary force and a true celebrity in American culture. But by the time The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952 (and would prove to be his final novel), there were somewhat gleeful cries that he was past his prime. Even critical reviews of The Old Man and the Sea from decades later refer to it as a sign that Hemingway’s best days were behind him.
In January of 1954, after winning his belated Pulitzer at long last, Hemingway was in Africa with his fourth (and final) wife, Mary. The two were involved in two plane crashes that left Hemingway with horrific injuries, which increased his drinking (which already qualified him as, at a minimum, a light alcoholic) as a way of dealing with the pain. He had suffered many other serious injuries during his life and career, but these incidents mark the slow decline, both physical and mental, that led to Hemingway’s suicide in 1961. The mental illness was likely inherited from Hemingway’s father Clarence, who had also died by suicide, but it couldn’t have been helped by the numerous concussions Hemingway had experienced in his lifetime.
Today, Hemingway’s name remains synonymous with American literature. He is still widely read in schools and will likely still be popular in another hundred years.
Details of Hemingway’s life were verified but were largely taken from his Wikipedia page.
Are There Adaptations or Sequels?
There are no sequels, but there have been three film adaptations. The first, in 1958, starred Spencer Tracy as Santiago, and it earned Tracy an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. The second was a 1990 TV movie starring Anthony Quinn. The third is actually an animated short from 1999 that won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short.
Is The Old Man and the Sea the Great American Novel?
I have complicated feelings about the concept of the “Great American Novel,” and I’ve spoken about that before. There’s also the compounding fact that The Old Man and the Sea is set in Cuba. I believe more in a canon of Great American Literature than a specific Great American Novel, and as good as this novella is, I feel comfortable leaving it off of that list.
What Was The Old Man and the Sea‘s Competition for the Pulitzer?
There were two jurors for this year. One recommended The Old Man and the Sea to the Advisory Board, and the other recommended Carl Jonas’ Jefferson Selleck. Jefferson Selleck had been a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction that year and sounds like an interesting read, but it has fallen out of print and I’m willing to bet most people haven’t heard of it before (I certainly hadn’t). I would be interested in reading Jefferson Selleck, but it appears the only way I can do that is to order a book from the original printing runs off of a used book site. Maybe someday, but not right now.
So I can’t really compare the two finalists, but I can say that only one of those books has stood the test of time. If we feel comfortable applying the test of time standard, it seems the correct book won. And incidentally, the juror who recommended Jefferson Selleck was so displeased with the outcome that he declined to serve on the jury again the following year. There is so much drama in Pulitzer history.
But as you can imagine, a lot more than two American novels were published in 1952. Here are some books that have also stood the test of time from the same year:
- Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. Even after it won the National Book Award, it’s disappointing but not altogether surprising that the Pulitzer overlooked an experimental novel about a black man’s quest for identity in a racist America. Thankfully, time has looked more kindly upon this book, which is now regarded as a classic of American literature.
- Giant, Edna Ferber. Perhaps the fact that Edna Ferber had already won the Pulitzer Prize (for 1924’s So Big) made the jury and Board willing to overlook one of Ferber’s biggest successes as a novelist. While it hasn’t had quite the staying power of Invisible Man, Giant was, well, huge when it was published. Like many of Ferber’s novels, it also inspired a hit movie adaptation.
- The Natural, Bernard Malamud. Malamud would later win a Pulitzer Prize for 1966’s The Fixer, and The Natural would eventually make its way to the silver screen in 1984, with Robert Redford in one of his most iconic performances, but it didn’t make waves with the Pulitzer.
- East of Eden, John Steinbeck. Steinbeck had many hits in his career (indeed, he won his own Pulitzer for The Grapes of Wrath), so it should tell you something that East of Eden is considered to be his best book by many readers. But at the time it was published, critics weren’t convinced, calling East of Eden heavy-handed and even repulsive due to its portrayal of sex and violence (no word on how those critics felt about the biblical stories that inspired the book). As with Invisible Man, you can see why the Pulitzer ignored this book, but time has made it an American classic.
Should The Old Man and the Sea Have Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?
If this race were being held in the present, I think it’s fair to say that Invisible Man would have been a bigger contender for The Old Man and the Sea to face. But since this was 1952, that’s not how things played out. In the context of the era, and with all the factors I mentioned about the other real and potential contenders for this year, I think this win makes a lot of sense. And it feels correct to me. The Old Man and the Sea is a good book and a good winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Other Pulitzer Prize Deep Dives
His Family (1918) • Now in November (1935) • Gone With the Wind (1937) • The Grapes of Wrath (1940) • To Kill a Mockingbird (1961) • The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983) • Lonesome Dove (1986) • Interpreter of Maladies (2000) • March (2006) • Tinkers (2010) • Less (2018) • The Netanyahus (2022) • TIE: Trust and Demon Copperhead (2023) • Night Watch (2024) • James (2025)
Deep Dives On Pulitzer Years With No Winner
Supposedly Fun 