Ernest Hemingway: 1950 - Death

Across the River and Into the Trees, was Hemingway's first novel in a decade.
             It was soon after this, in June of 1951, that his mother died in Memphis, Tennessee. Not since he was a child did he get along with his mother, in fact he blamed her for his father committing suicide, yet he attended her funeral. .
             He started another novel, one that he had been thinking about for quite awhile. It was about an old man and a fish, The Old Man and the Sea, it was published in 1952, Hemingway wanted to make a good impression after the last novel was such a failure. The novel is all he expects it to be, and puts his name back on top as one of the great writers. Restoring him to the fame, he felt he truly deserved. .
             The Old Man and the Sea, tells the story of an old Cuban fisherman named Santiago, who after going eighty-six days of not catching anything finally catches a giant marlin. As he returns to the harbor, a shark eats the fish that had been lashed to his boat. Hemingway's longtime friend and boat captain, Gregorio Fuentes, was said to be the inspiration for the main character in "The Old Man and the Sea" (Hemingway, the fall, 1). He wins the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for the Old Man and the Sea. This is one of the few novels that he wrote that did not involve a woman he had seen or was seeing. .
             With the money, he got for writing such a magnificent book, Earnest and Mary, his forth and final wife, decided to go to Africa. While in Africa, the Hemingway=s were in two plane crashes. The first while doing some site seeing, causing Mary to have a few fractured ribs, but nothing bad. The second would eventually cut short Ernest=s life, his skull was fractured, two discs of his spine were cracked, his right arm and shoulder were dislocated, his liver, right kidney and spleen were ruptured, arms, face and head were burned by the flames of the plane, his vision and hearing were impaired.