Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without a catch, hooks a giant marlin and battles it for three days, only to have sharks devour it before he can bring it home. Hemingway wrote this after years of critical dismissal, and it won him the Pulitzer and contributed to the Nobel. The prose is stripped to essentials, the story elemental. A man may be destroyed but not defeated: the line captures Hemingway's code. The skeleton lashed to Santiago's skiff is both defeat and triumph. The novella is about failure, about endurance, about what we bring back from the deep.