Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe Crusoe learns fishing when he is living as a slave in Moorish captivity. His skills come in useful once he is shipwrecked. “I frequently caught fish enough, as much as I cared to eat; all which I dried in the sun, and ate them dry.” He also hooks a dolphin.
“Point Rash-Judgement” by William Wordsworth The poet is walking with friends when they notice “a Man / Attired in peasant’s garb, who stood alone, / Angling beside the margin of the lake”. They moralise to each other about the fecklessness of someone who is enjoying such sport in the middle of the harvest, but then he turns towards them and they see he is “gaunt and lean, with sunken cheeks / And wasted limbs”. He is fishing because he is starving.
“The Fisherman” by WB Yeats Fishing can make you noble, it seems. Yeats recalls a man who went “To a grey place on a hill / In grey Connemara clothes / At dawn to cast his flies”. Silent and intent, “Climbing up to a place / Where stone is dark under froth”, he is contrasted with all the vain and clamorous men that the poet has known.
The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher by Beatrix Potter Jeremy is a frog, who dons a Macintosh and galoshes to go fishing. A good thing too, because after catching and releasing a stickleback, he gets swallowed by a hungry trout. The trout finds the coat indigestible and regurgitates the fortunate Jeremy, who hops home resolved not to go fishing again.
“Big Two-Hearted River” by Ernest Hemingway Nick Adams is off on his own, camping in the wilds of Michigan. He eventually catches a huge fish. “There was a heaviness, a power not to be held, and then the bulk of him, as he jumped.” Gradually you realise that the minute description of Nick’s pursuit is an evasion of the trauma of war from which he has recently escaped.
Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan Much of this hippy classic was written during the author’s camping trip in Idaho, which features in the book. It is a collage of sketches and memories in which fishing recurs, a boyhood enthusiasm that focuses the author’s bucolic ideals.
“So Much Water So Close to Home” by Raymond Carver A woman finds out that her husband and his pals discovered the dead body of a woman floating in the water where they were fishing. It emerges that they decided not to let the discovery spoil their male-bonding trip, tethered the corpse for a couple of days and went on fishing. Her husband cannot understand her horror.
“Pike” by Ted Hughes Hughes invokes boyhood memories of fishing in a pike-patrolled pond. “It was as deep as England. It held / Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old / That past nightfall I dared not cast.” The boy fishes frozen in fear, thinking of the pike “That rose slowly toward me, watching”.
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx Quoyle flees to Newfoundland and comes to rest in Killick-Claw, a town on the edge of the Atlantic suffused with the tang of fish. He works for the local newspaper, whose editor calls in sick almost every day so that he can go fishing. Quoyle is slowly reborn, finding out all about love and cod fishing.
The Human Stain by Philip Roth Roth’s novel ends with a fishing episode that is as far from philosophic serenity as you can get. Zuckerman finds Les Farley, whom he knows to be a killer, ice fishing on a secluded New England lake. On the ice next to him lies the ice-augur, his murderously sharp cutting tool. “And now you know my secret spot . . . You know everything . . . But you won’t tell nobody, will you?”
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Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/27/ten-best-fishing-trips-literature
