Happy almost birthday to "The Old Man and the Sea"

A few anniversaries for Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea are coming up in the next week-plus.

On this day in 1952, Orville Prescott of The New York Times praised the work but concluded it was "good only in a limited way."

That said, on September 1, the book was published in LIFE, and five million copies of the magazine were sold in two days. (A week later, the standalone book was released.)

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