Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was a novelist, short story writer, journalist, and sportsman. The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel published in 1952, the last major work of fiction by Hemingway which was published during his lifetime. It is the story of the old fisherman Santiago who sets out before dawn on an odyssey that takes him far out to sea. He catches a gigantic marlin and suffers tremendous hardship to bring the great fish to land. In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway.