In language of great simplicity and power, Hemingway tells the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck--he hasn't caught a fish in 84 days--who goes out in his small skiff one more time. This time he hooks a huge marlin. During his relentless ordeal, a long and agonizing battle with the marlin far out in the Gulf Stream, the old man faces long days of hunger and exhaustion, his courage and his respect for his adversary never flagging. The man is old and tired and at the end of his life, but he remains the archetypical Hemingway hero who refuses to accept defeat. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Donald Sutherland's reading of 1953's Pulitzer Prize–winning The Old Man and the Sea—the novel tipped the Nobel scales in Hemingway's favor—alas, should be fed to the sharks. Quite disappointing since Sutherland has turned in countless top-drawer performances in a wide variety of films and clearly is a solid actor. He sounds like he's phoning it in here and is seriously trumped by Charlton Heston's 1977 Grammy-winning Old Man reading included in Caedmon's The Ernest Hemingway Audio Collection. Nonetheless, with Old Man's continued popularity and perseverance in high school and college curricula, you may want to purchase it. —Michael Rogers,Library Journal Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in the family home in Oak Park, Ill., on July 21, 1899. In high school, Hemingway enjoyed working on The Trapeze, his school newspaper, where he wrote his first articles. Upon graduation in the spring of 1917, Hemingway took a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star.

After a short stint in the U.S. Army as a volunteer Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy, Hemingway moved to Paris, and it was here that Hemingway began his well-documented career as a novelist. Hemingway's first collection of short stories and vignettes, entitled In Our Time, was published in 1925. His first major novel, The Sun Also Rises, the story of American and English expatriates in Paris and on excursion to Pamplona, immediately established him as one of the great prose stylists and preeminent writers of his time. In this book, Hemingway quotes Gertrude Stein, "You are all a lost generation," thereby labeling himself and other expatriate writers, including Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, and Ford Madox Ford.

Other novels written by Hemingway include: A Farewell To Arms, the story, based in part on Hemingway's life, of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse; For Whom the Bell Tolls, the story of an American who fought, loved, and died with the guerrillas in the mountains of Spain; and To Have and Have Not, about an honest man forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West. Non-fiction includes Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in East Africa; and A Moveable Feast, his recollections of Paris in the Roaring 20s. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novella, The Old Man and the Sea.

A year after being hospitalized for uncontrolled high blood pressure, liver disease, diabetes, and depression, Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.

(Bowker Author Biography) Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He is one of the towering authors of the twentieth century.

(Publisher Provided) Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.