The Old Man and the Sea

Hemingway’s late masterpiece, which helped win him the Nobel Prize, tells a simple story with enormous weight. Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without a catch, hooks a great marlin far out in the Gulf Stream and fights it for days, only to lose it to sharks on the way home. Pared to the bone, it is a parable about endurance, dignity, and grace under pressure, and one of the books Jack Dorsey counts among those that shaped him.