Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for 'The Old Man and the Sea' in 1953.
The award recognized Hemingway's widely praised novella about Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles to land a giant marlin. Although the story was published in 1952, the Pulitzer was awarded the following year, which explains why 1953 is the correct answer rather than the novella's publication year.
The work marked a major late-career success for Hemingway after the poor critical reception of his previous novel, 'Across the River and into the Trees'. 'The Old Man and the Sea' first appeared in 'Life' magazine in September 1952, where it reached millions of readers almost immediately.
The Pulitzer was Hemingway's first, despite earlier major novels such as 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'. In 1954, the novella was also the only work explicitly mentioned when Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature, making it central to his late literary reputation.