The Waiter and the Fisherman: And Other Essays in Literature and Culture

Three decades after his first stories were published, a quarter of a century after his novel, Hemingway in his old age writes of an "old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." On the eighty-fifth day he goes farther out to sea than before, and then for three days and nights he battles mightily with a mighty fish. It is a monster fish, eighteen feet long, great, beautiful, indomitable, but it is finally conquered by the equally indomitable spirit of a weakening old man. . . .

"It is true that the story ends on a despondent note: the old man has lost not only his fish but even the glory of his achievement. Some tourists come and in their abysmal ignorance dismiss the enormous skeleton as that of a shark! But the old man is unaffected by the inane remarks of ignorant tourists. He is asleep and he is dreaming of lions.