Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost

Now they have beaten me, he thought. I am too old to club sharks to death. But I will try it as long as I have the oars and the short club and the tiller.

He took all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride and he put it against the fish’s agony and the fish came over onto his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff and started to pass the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water.

The day before she left, Hemingway tussled six hours and fifty minutes with a 514-pound tuna. When his Pilar cruised into harbor at 9:30 that night, the whole population of the island flocked to see his fish and hear his tale. “A fatuous old man with a new yacht and a young bride had arrived not long previously, announcing that tuna-fishing, of who

The six Mitchell pieces that would eventually constitute his book, The Bottom of the Harbor, a classic of American nonfiction,