The Old Man and the Sea is a novella by Ernest Hemingway that was written in 1951 and then published in 1952. It is Hemingway's most famous work, and also his final work to be published while he was alive. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 for this work. Hemingway wrote it while he was in the Bahamas. The work tells the story of Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman who catches a giant marlin in the Gulf Stream.