In 1917 Hemingway joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year he volunteered to work as an ambulance driver on the Italian front where he was badly wounded but twice decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919 and married in 1921. In 1922 he reported on the Greco-Turkish war, then two years later resigned from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with such fellowAmerican expatriates as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Their encouragement and criticism were to play a valuable part in the formation of his style.

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana,Hemingway's magnificent fable is the story of an oldman, a young boy and a giant fish. In a perfectlycrafted story, which won for Hemingway the NobelPrize for Literature, is a unique and timeless vision ofthe beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elementsin which he lives.