The Old Man and the Sea is the story of an epic struggle between an old man and a big fish. Santiago is the very old Cuban fisherman whose been unable to catch a fish for eighty four days. Santiago has an apprentice called Manolin. Manolin adores the old man but his parents tell him he must stop fishing with Santiago because he is not catching any fish or making any money.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 as the son of a doctor and the second of six children. After a stint as an ambulance driver at the Italian front, Hemingway came home to America in 1919, only to return to the battlefield - this time as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish war - in 1922. Resigning from journalism to focus on his writing instead, he moved to Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with fellow American expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Through the years, Hemingway travelled widely and wrote avidly, becoming an internationally recognized literary master of his craft. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.