Pulitzer Prize Fiction Winner
The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
Summary
An aging Cuban fisherman named Santiago, long unlucky at sea, hooks an enormous marlin far out in the Gulf Stream and endures days of solitary struggle to bring it home. Hemingway's pared down prose, biblical cadences, and tight focus on a single contest distill the themes of endurance and dignified defeat that ran through his earlier work. The novella reanimated his reputation, and readers widely treat it as a capstone of his late style.
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Historical Context & Significance
After the Board snubbed him in 1941, Hemingway finally won for what many consider his final masterpiece. It helped secure his Nobel Prize in 1954.