Synopses & Reviews
To Have and Have Not is the dramatic, brutal story of Harry Morgan, an honest boat owner who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who swarm the region, and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair.
In this harshly realistic, yet oddly tender and wise novel, Hemingway perceptively delineates the personal struggles of both the "haves" and the "have nots" and creates one of the most subtle and moving portraits of a love affair in his oeuvre. In turn funny and tragic, lively and poetic, remarkable in its emotional impact, To Have and Have Not takes literary high adventure to a new level. As the Times Literary Supplement observed, "Hemingway's gift for dialogue, for effective understatement, and for communicating such emotions the tough allow themselves, has never been more conspicuous."
Synopsis
A Scribner Classics Edition From one of the best writers in American literature, a classic novel about smuggling, intrigue, and love.
To Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair.
In this harshly realistic, yet oddly tender and wise novel, Hemingway perceptively delineates the personal struggles of both the haves and the have nots and creates one of the most subtle and moving portraits of a love affair in his oeuvre. By turns funny and tragic, lively and poetic, remarkable in its emotional impact, To Have and Have Not is literary high adventure at its finest.
Synopsis
First published in 1937, To Have and Have Not is one of Hemingway's most entertaining novels. This realistic adventure tale and subtle portrait of an unlikely love affair demonstrates "Hemingway's gift for dialogue, for effective understatement, and for communicating such emotions as the tough allow themselves" (Times Literary Supplement).
About the Author
Ernest Hemingway ranks as the most famous of twentieth-century American writers; like Mark Twain, Hemingway is one of those rare authors most people know about, whether they have read him or not. The difference is that Twain, with his white suit, ubiquitous cigar, and easy wit, survives in the public imagination as a basically, lovable figure, while the deeply imprinted image of Hemingway as rugged and macho has been much less universally admired, for all his fame. Hemingway has been regarded less as a writer dedicated to his craft than as a man of action who happened to be afflicted with genius. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, Time magazine reported the news under Heroes rather than Books and went on to describe the author as "a globe-trotting expert on bullfights, booze, women, wars, big game hunting, deep sea fishing, and courage." Hemingway did in fact address all those subjects in his books, and he acquired his expertise through well-reported acts of participation as well as of observation; by going to all the wars of his time, hunting and fishing for great beasts, marrying four times, occasionally getting into fistfights, drinking too much, and becoming, in the end, a worldwide celebrity recognizable for his signature beard and challenging physical pursuits.