The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway's 1952 novella follows Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without a catch and is thought to be unlucky. His young apprentice Manolin has been moved by his parents to a luckier boat but still helps with the old man's gear and brings him food. On the eighty-fifth day Santiago rows far out into the Gulf Stream alone and hooks a marlin so large that it starts towing his skiff out to sea, opening a long contest of endurance between man and fish. Hemingway wrote it in Cuba in about six weeks. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was singled out when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Jack Dorsey says he keeps returning to it for its directness, economy and poetry, and sees in it a struggle that recurs across countless stories, true and invented.