Youth (1903) and Typhoon (1902), both by Joseph Conrad, are sea stories with intriguing parallels to Hemingway's work. It is believed that Hemingway, who read all of Conrad in Paris and Toronto during the twenties, may have consciously or unconsciously used the "central strategy" of Youth when writing The Old Man and the Sea.

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) was Hemingway's last successfully received novel before The Old Man and the Sea, and the only previous Hemingway novel in which a Hispanic background plays a major part. It depicts the struggle of Robert Jordan, an American fighting against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, to live up to his political and personal ideals without becoming narrowly partisan.

Islands in the Stream, published posthumously in 1970, is the book, as edited, of which The Old Man and the Sea was originally envisaged by...