Hemingway witnessed a man and a boy in a small boat being dragged by a fish that the man had hooked. ... Hemingway watched the struggle for half the day, finally pulling his own boat close enough to throw some provisions into the boat of the embattled fisherman and boy. ...
The twentieth century really begins before the end of the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1887 was felt by many to represent the end of an era. An end-of-century stoicism, and a growing pessimism among writers and intellectuals, may be traced to several sources, not least the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species which put the existence of God into radical question. Across the whole population, and in the face of rapid economic and social changes, radical doubts about the stability of the existing order were expressed. By the end of the nine...