The novella was highly anticipated and was released to record sales; the initial critical reception was equally positive, but attitudes have varied significantly since then.

His previous novel Across the River and Into the Trees had met with negative reviews and, amid a breakdown in relations with his wife Mary, he had fallen in love with his muse Adriana Ivancich.

Having completed one book of a planned "sea trilogy", Hemingway began to write as an addendum a story about an old man and a marlin that had originally been told to him fifteen years earlier.

Thematic analysis has focused on Christian imagery and symbolism, on the similarity of the novella's themes to its predecessors in the Hemingway canon, and on the character of the fisherman Santiago.

The Old Man and the Sea was Ernest Hemingway's sixth major novel, following The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), To Have and Have Not (1937), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and Across the River and Into the Trees (1950).

[1] Although the latter, published on September 7, sold 75,000 copies in its first month and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-one weeks, critical reception was largely negative.

[3] In the mid-1930s, the Cuban guide Carlos Gutiérrez had related a story involving an old man and a giant marlin to Hemingway, who retold it in Esquire magazine in an essay titled "On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter".

[4] According to Mary Cruz, this tale was likely first told by the Cuban author Ramón Meza y Suárez Inclán in 1891 and was consistently retold by fishermen over the next forty years.

He greatly enjoyed the sport of big-game fishing, participating in and winning several tournaments, and he also became an avid amateur naturalist, inviting luminaries such as Henry Weed Fowler and Charles Cadwalader to record and describe catches on his boat, the Pilar.

During a single month on board, aided by Hemingway's skill in fishing and sailing, the ichthyologist Fowler learnt enough to "revise the classification of marlin for the whole North Atlantic.

"[6] Having put off a novelisation for sixteen years, but aided by his love and knowledge of fishing and the sea, Hemingway suddenly found himself writing a thousand words a day—twice as fast as usual.

[9] The 26,531-word manuscript was held in temporary abeyance for over a year, during which time Hemingway became increasingly certain he wished to publish it on its own merits, rather than as an addendum to the "sea trilogy".

[11] He rejected the initial cover designs from his publisher Charles Scribner's Sons, and asked Ivancich to draw a set of sketches which he found much more suitable.

Hemingway's old adversary William Faulkner released a highly positive review, and word-of-mouth reached such proportions that both the Life and Scribner's editions were heavily bootlegged.

[18] Hemingway's favourite review was from the art historian Bernard Berenson, who wrote that The Old Man and the Sea was superior to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and equal in many ways to the Homeric epics.

Seymour Krim wrote that The Old Man and the Sea was "only more of the same", while John W. Aldridge felt himself "unable to share in the prevailing wild enthusiasm" for the novella.

[21] Despite the cooling critical outlook, The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on May 4, 1953—this was the first time Hemingway had received the award, having been overlooked previously for A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

[23] The Old Man and the Sea's highest recognition came on October 28, 1954, as the only work of Hemingway's mentioned by the Swedish Academy when awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature; they praised its "powerful, style-making mastery of the art of modern narration".

However, Philip Young's republication of Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration in 1966 was much less positive than the original edition in 1952, setting the disinterested scholarly tone that would dominate the next decades.

[35] Meyers criticises The Old Man and the Sea's melodrama, symbolism, and irony, concluding, like Macdonald, that "Hemingway either deceived himself about the profundity of his art" or expertly satisfied the desires of a pretentious audience.

"[37] Bickford Sylvester comments that most of the errors Weeks outlined were based upon faults in then-current science, and some others were intended to nudge readers towards the work's subtext and deepest details.

[43] Backman views Santiago as the climactic "matador" of Hemingway's works, who manages to seek a type of natural violence quite unlike the "violent ritualized" bullfighting or "uneasily insistent" killing found in previous novels.

There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.This passage was characterised by Sylvester, Grimes, and Hays as "a clear reference to a crucifixion"; taking place, like Christ's death, at three o'clock on a Friday afternoon, it acts as the climax of the religious parallels.

[52] Brenner's analysis has been strongly criticised: Stoneback terms it a "jejune litany of ... shock-schlock critical fast-food [and] tired old questions", while Sylvester, Grimes, and Hays notes that "much of the book reeks of rabid exaggeration and misreading".

Even though Santiago is firmly embedded in Cuban culture, he dreams about Spain every night, and Herlily believes that this migrant background acts "as a concealed foundation to the novella.