To Have and Have Not (1937) marked Ernest Hemingway's return to book-length fiction eight years after the publication of his last novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929). The literary world had been waiting for a new Hemingway novel, and the critics, whom Hemingway professed to ignore, had been eager to see him take up the current world-wide economic crisis in his fiction. As its Marxist-sounding title suggests, Hemingway did acknowledge the Great Depression in To Have and Have Not. He also experimented with the form of the novel, employing a much more complex structure than he had used in his novels of the 1920s.
The novel grew out of two short stories Hemingway had published in 1934 and 1936. These stories, “One …
1290 words
Citation: Fleming, Robert E.. "To Have and Have Not". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 September 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8380, accessed 19 April 2024.]
