Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American 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 written by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime. In search of an epic catch, the old fisherman Santiago 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.