The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.'”Ĭollectors of fine first editions should look for Scribner’s seal and the letter “A” on the copyright page as the notation for first printing. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.

Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.’ He opens two bottles of beer and continues: ‘I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. ‘That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. “‘No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in,’ says Hemingway. Two weeks later the novel was issued in book form with a first edition printing of 50,000 copies and a simultaneous Book of the Month Club publication.Īfter winning the hearts of Americans, the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes, Hemingway reflected on the novel in a December 1954 interview with Time magazine: I’m very excited about the book and that it is coming out in LIFE so that many people will read it who could not afford to buy it.”įive million copies of the magazine sold within two days. “Don’t you think it is a strange damn story that it should affect all of us (me especially) the way it does?. Hemingway wrote to Daniel Longwell, LIFE Editorial Board Chairman: Hemingway believed so strongly in the story of The Old Man and the Sea that he agreed to release the novel through a LIFE magazine insert two weeks before the book’s release. After Hemingway’s friend and Broadway producer Leland Hayward talked about the novel with enthusiasm at a LIFE editorial lunch, Hayward sent a manuscript to the editorial board at LIFE. The Old Man and the Sea first appeared as a 20-page insert in the Septemissue of LIFE magazine. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

The old man and the sea 1st edition