Great Depression Fiction Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not in the 1956 Perma Paperback Edition

Ernest Hemingway

Book

Hemingway, Ernest. To Have and Have Not, 1956, follows Florida Straits boat captain Harry Morgan as economic desperation during the Great Depression pushes him from charter fishing into smuggling between Key West and Havana. First published in 1937, the novel developed while Hemingway was traveling between the United States and Spain during the Spanish Civil War, a period in which his political writing became increasingly outspoken against fascism. Its treatment of poverty, wealthy tourists, working people, and the choices imposed by economic deprivation marks a pronounced engagement with class and collective responsibility within Hemingway’s 1930s fiction. The novel’s fragmented structure originated partly in previously published Harry Morgan stories, giving its account of Depression era Key West and Cuba a deliberately shifting range of characters and perspectives.

Hemingway, Ernest. To Have and Have Not. New York: Perma Books, 1956. Third printing of the Perma mass market paperback edition. 180 pages. Pictorial wrappers with cover illustration by Tom Dunn. Measures 4.25 x 6.5 inches. Dunn depicts a sailor seated at a table while a woman watches from a doorway behind him, translating Hemingway’s maritime setting and sexual tension into the visual language of midcentury paperback fiction. The back wrapper advertises the protagonist as “Hard, Ruthless, Implacable.” Harry Morgan’s increasingly dangerous work includes running contraband and transporting Cuban revolutionaries, while the novel contrasts his struggle to support his family with the lives of affluent visitors and yacht owners.

Hemingway wrote the novel as the Spanish Civil War intensified his involvement with contemporary politics, although its immediate subjects remain Depression era Florida, Cuba, class inequality, and individual survival rather than the war in Spain itself. The story subsequently produced three major American film adaptations: Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not in 1944, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall with a screenplay by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner; Michael Curtiz’s The Breaking Point in 1950; and Don Siegel’s The Gun Runners in 1958. The 1944 film substantially altered Hemingway’s setting and politics, converting the story into a wartime adventure set in Vichy controlled Martinique. Slight wear around the fore edge; binding tight. Very good condition. The Perma edition preserves Tom Dunn’s pulp treatment of Hemingway’s Depression era novel and the terse promotional language used to market literary fiction to the postwar paperback audience.

Item #19930

Price: $75.00