To Have and Have Not

Description

Hemingway's adventure novel set on the verge of the tropics. Ernest Hemingway's adventure novel set on the verge of the tropics. 'Listen,' I told him. 'Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet.' Harry Morgan is a tough guy making his living during the Depression from his motor boat in Key West, Florida. Although he normally takes out fishing parties, sometimes his boat can be put to other uses. If the money offered is worth his while, Harry will run guns, rum and men to and from Cuba. But he is playing a dicey game. Hemingway's hardest hero risks not just his living, but his life. 'Absorbing and moving. It opens with a fusillade of bullets, reaches its climax with another, and sustains a high pitch of excitement throughout' Times Literary Supplement

Ernest Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899, the second of six children. In 1917, he joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919, and married in 1921. In 1922, he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris, associating with other expatriates like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing. Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.

This active, passionate life on the verge of the tropics is perfect material for the Hemingway style, and the reader carries away from the book a sense of freshness and exhilaration * New Statesman * Absorbing and moving. It opens with a fusillade of bullets, reaches its climax with another, and sustains a high pitch of excitement throughout * Times Literary Supplement * Its tragic scenes are rendered with an economy of words and a power that might well be the despair of a lesser writer * Scotsman *