Published 1937 / Length 180 pages
To Have and Have Not is a work of thrilling subtropical action. The central character, Harry Morgan, is one of Hemingway’s famous macho men. He’s a hard drinker and tough talker who is forced, by poverty and circumstance, into rum-running and people-smuggling from the dangerous coast of Cuba to the Florida Keys. Around him circle a collection of characters for whom penury, alcoholism, failed love affairs and casual violence are a way of life. Although To Have and Have Not is often regarded as one of Hemingway’s weakest novels, this critical viewpoint does not take into account the darkness and depth of the book. So much more than just a thriller set in the thirties, it examines a community for whom the American dream has failed. The writing is frequently understated, yet characters are unafraid to register emotion in the face of crisis. Ultimately, the novel is about the human urge to survive, and the problem of fighting only for yourself in an interdependent society.
‘[To Have and Have Not] … shows extraordinary mastery of the art of indirect exposition of character … In life, our ideas of other persons are inferences based on what they say and do. Hemingway chooses to let us learn about his characters in the same way.’ – GRANVILLE HICKS, The New Yorker
• Is Harry Morgan a sympathetic character? How does his marked racism affect modern audiences?
• The story is told from several different points of view: why do you think this is? How successful is it?
• Why do you think Hemingway included the professors and their marital disputes? Do they help to make a point about the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’?
• As the famous quotation from John Donne’s ‘Meditation XVII’ states: ‘No man is an island.’ Do Harry’s words at the end of the book offer the reader any kind of resolution? What do they even mean?
• Critics have often accused To Have and Have Not of being several short stories strung together, rather than an entire novel. Is there a coherence to or general message throughout the whole work?
• Ernest Hemingway is one of the most famous twentieth-century American authors, credited with helping shape what is considered to be the ‘American style’: understated description from ambiguous narrators.
• To Have and Have Not was written at the end of a dark period for the USA: in 1934, the Depression had depleted the national average income by 40 per cent and Prohibition had proved an unsuccessful experiment in taking away the one thing – alcohol – that had kept many happy.
• Diamonds are Forever by IAN FLEMING – another thriller with a similarly complex central character.
• Jamaica Inn by DAPHNE DU MAURIER – alcoholism and smuggling in nineteenth-century Cornwall.
• Our Man in Havana by GRAHAM GREENE – set during the corrupt pre-Castro Cuban regime, twenty years after the events of To Have and Have Not.