SOURCE: "The Old Man and the Sea," in Ernest Hemingway and the Pursuit of Heroism, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968, pp. 159-74.

In the following chapter from a full-length book about Hemingway's notion of heroism, which is a revised version of an article that originally appeared in College English in 1955, Gurko examines The Old Man and the Sea in the context of Hemingway's other work, seeing it as a movement away from society and its artifices to the challenges of nature and the possibility for liberation of the human spirit.

The hero of Hemingway's last story is an aged Cuban fisherman named Santiago. he is more than a hero; he is a superman. Though very old, he has the physical strength of a young man and a spirit that is absolutely indomitable. Everything about him is outsized: his age, strength, his cheerful disposition, even the run of extraordinary bad...