Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not

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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 Trip Across” and “The Tradesman's Return”, introduced a protagonist very

1290 words

Citation: Fleming, Robert E.. "To Have and Have Not". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 September 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8380, accessed 24 November 2024.]

8380 To Have and Have Not 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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