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Sunday, January 12, 2014

The Best Sentence in American Literature?

For me the best sentence in American Literature is:


“It was an hour before the first shark hit.” Ernest Hemingway – The Old Man and the Sea


Hemingway has had his old man, Santiago, battle age, bad luck, and the mightiest marlin he has ever seen and he has defeated them all. He has proven to himself and to the world that he is still a man. And we think Santiago is triumphantly sailing home to claim his success when Hemingway punches us in the face with this sentence and lets us know that there is just this one other little thing to deal with. Simply, adroitly, Hemingway moves the action to a wider plane. He takes what had been an intimate one on one combat and throws it into a world war, an us against them action. And in a world war even the victors suffer. That is a lot to achieve with one sentence.

George W. Parker