Publication of The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway, written in Cuba in 1951 and published in 1952, when it appeared in Life magazine in September and as a book soon after. It tells of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish, and who then hooks an enormous marlin and struggles for days to bring it in, only to see sharks eat it on the way back. The spare style and the themes of endurance, dignity and defeat made it a success after Hemingway's earlier novel had been poorly received. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and was cited when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

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