"A man can be destroyed but not defeated. ” The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952. One of his most famous works, the novel tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba. The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.