LIFEsize Hemingway

When Broadway Producer Leland Hayward went to a LIFE editorial lunch six months ago he talked about the theater. But afterward he talked even more enthusiastically about his friend Ernest Hemingway's new novel, which he had just read while visiting the author in Cuba. To back up his claims for the book, Hayward sent a spare copy of the manuscript to LIFE'S editors. Result: this week LIFE (circ. 5,339,565) is publishing a special 20-page insert of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the first time in the memory of publishers that a U.S. magazine has ever printed a novel complete in one issue before its appearance in book form. In two weeks Scribner's will bring out the 140-page, $3 book, a Book-of-the-Month Club choice for September.

Hemingway, who got $30,000 plus from LIFE for the 27,000-word novel, controls U.S. pre-publication rights on all his writing. He was willing to take the chance of hurting book sales by advance publication in LIFE, so that more people could read the story. Wrote Novelist Hemingway to Daniel Longwell, LIFE Editorial Board Chairman: "Don't you think it is a strange damn story that it should affect all of us (me especially) the way it does? . . . I'm very excited about the book and that it is coming out in LIFE so that many people will read it who could not afford to buy it . . . It was wonderful luck Leland read it and showed it to you guys."