Hemingway's Debt to Baseball in The Old Man and The Sea
| Author: | Hurley, C. | |
| Year: | 1992 | |
| Pages: | 124 | |
| ISBN: | 0-7734-9546-0 978-0-7734-9546-3 | |
| Price: | $139.95 + shipping | |
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Ernest Hemingway's lifelong fascination with baseball finds its ultimate expression in The Old Man and the Sea. This work brings together many of the commentaries that contributed individually and collectively to our understanding of baseball's role in the fiction. They exhibit the extent of Hemingway's familiarity with the sport and its participants; provide needed historical annotation on players and managers; explore the complexities of Santiago's relationship to Joe DiMaggio; identify for the first time the actual games and events underlying the fictional account; and enable interested readers to determine for themselves the aptness of baseball to Hemingway's theme of courage and determination. The writers whose work appears here agree that Hemingway, acclaimed as both athlete and artist, frequently sought to transform the evanescence of sport into the permanence of art.
Reviews
". . . well worth reading; it puts into the hand of the Hemingway student a breadth of scholarship heretofore only available (with some effort) in major research libraries. I found the selections immensely informative and consistently interesting. . . . I can imagine this "casebook" as a supplementary text for courses on topics as diverse as the American Novel, popular culture, history of the twentieth century, research methods." - Paul Vincent in Scholarly Research and Review
"The selections in parts one and two are of interest to scholars working not only on baseball in The Old Man and the Sea, but also on the broader issue of Hemingway's use of baseball as well as other historical material in his fiction. . . . this is a useful book. . . Hurley has provided a good deal of widely scattered criticism in one place, a desideratum in itself. In part three. . . his essays are detailed and suggestive of areas worthy of further study." - Luis Losada in The Hemingway Review
". . . develops a well-argued piece which places the baseball heroics of DiMaggio as a corresponding, if not motivating, factor for Santiago while at sea. . . . This book, then, stands as a challenge for a further reevaluation of not only what Hemingway's great short novel is about, but also provides new opportunities to discover how, and why, Hemingway worked as he did. For that reason alone, this book is necessary reading and should be of interest to all Hemingway enthusiasts." - James R. McDonald in Scholarly Research and Review
"The selections in parts one and two are of interest to scholars working not only on baseball in The Old Man and the Sea, but also on the broader issue of Hemingway's use of baseball as well as other historical material in his fiction. . . . this is a useful book. . . Hurley has provided a good deal of widely scattered criticism in one place, a desideratum in itself. In part three. . . his essays are detailed and suggestive of areas worthy of further study." - Luis Losada in The Hemingway Review
". . . develops a well-argued piece which places the baseball heroics of DiMaggio as a corresponding, if not motivating, factor for Santiago while at sea. . . . This book, then, stands as a challenge for a further reevaluation of not only what Hemingway's great short novel is about, but also provides new opportunities to discover how, and why, Hemingway worked as he did. For that reason alone, this book is necessary reading and should be of interest to all Hemingway enthusiasts." - James R. McDonald in Scholarly Research and Review