Three decades after his first stories were published, a quarter of a century after his novel, Hemingway in his old age writes of an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. On the eighty-fifth day he goes farther out to sea than before, and then for three days and nights he battles mightily with a mighty fish. It is a monster fish, eighteen feet long, great, beautiful, indomitable, but it is finally conquered by the equally indomitable spirit of a weakening old man. . . .

It is true that the story ends on a...