SOURCE: "Santiago in 'The Old Man and the Sea': A Homeric Hero," in The Hemingway Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, Fall, 1992, pp. 35-51.

In the following essay, Morgan and Losada trace parallels between Hemingway's fisherman Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea and the heroes of the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey.

When The Old Man and the Sea was published, Malcolm Cowley immediately noted its "classical" qualities (106-7). Within weeks Bernard Berenson, in the blurb he provided for the book, described it thus: "An idyll of the sea as sea, as un-Byronic and un-Melvillian as Homer himself, and communicated in a prose as calm and compelling as Homer's verse" (SL 785 n.l). Hemingway was both gratified by and concurred with Berenson's description (Morgan 78-80). Subsequent critics continued to discuss various classical aspects of OMATS in terms of both epic and drama, and in a recent work...