Why did Ernest Hemingway write “The Old Man and the Sea”?
Writers do not usually need a ‘why’; most simply write because they must. To ask this of Hemingway, who cannot answer for himself, is akin to a journalist asking Sir Edmund Hillary why he climbed Mt. Everest. The vague answer given was a jeer at the silly question itself, not the real reason. So while we cannot ask the writer himself ‘why’ he wrote one of his best books, we do know that Hemingway was coming through a rather bleak time in his writing career after being an allied correspondent in WWII. The story itself may give you some idea, being so unlike many of his other works as it refers to the Bible as the Sea of Knowledge, chronicles the desperate struggle of a fisherman pulling in a big fish for a chance at a better livelihood, encountered a great disappointment and life-death struggle and, shockingly, it ends on the rather high notes of rest, forgiveness and hope. When asked what the book symbolized, Hemingway had this to say: “No good book has ever been written that has in it
