“In 1952, LIFE sent legendary photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt to Cuba to shoot author Ernest Hemingway. The magazine needed photos to run alongside a new novella that would run in LIFE before it was published in book format. That book was The Old Man and the Sea, and the issue of LIFE where it was first printed went on to sell 5.3 million copies in two days.”
The thing is, LIFE’s editors decided to run the piece with illustrations based on Eisenstaedt’s photos, and not the photos themselves. Meaning that fruit of Eisenstaedt’s labors (he “would refer to the experience of shooting ‘Papa’ Hemingway as his most difficult assignment ever”) were mostly never seen by the public at large… until now: “Unpublished: Old Man and the Sea.”
