He gives slack as needed while the marlin pulls him far from land. With his back, shoulders, and hands, he holds the line for two days and nights. He is unwilling to tie the line to the boat for fear that a sudden jerk from the fish would break the line. By noon, he has hooked a big fish that he is sure is a marlin, but he is unable to haul it in. On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago takes his skiff out early. Santiago says that tomorrow, he will venture far out into the Gulf Stream, north of Cuba in the Straits of Florida to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end.

Manolin remains dedicated to Santiago, visiting his shack each night, hauling his fishing gear, preparing food, and talking about American baseball and Santiago's favorite player, Joe DiMaggio. Manolin, a young man whom Santiago has trained since childhood, has been forced by his parents to work on a luckier boat. He is now seen as ' salao' (colloquial pronunciation of ' salado', which means salty), the worst form of unlucky. Santiago is an aging, experienced fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954. One of his most famous works, it 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. It was the last major work of fiction written by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime.

The Old Man and the Sea is a novella written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cayo Blanco ( Cuba), and published in 1952.

The old man and the sea book cover