Novel: To Have and Have Not

Overview
Ernest Hemingway’s 1937 novel To Have and Have Not follows Harry Morgan, a hard-bitten fishing-boat captain in Depression-era Key West, as he slides from legal work into smuggling across the Florida Straits. Framed by the stark contrast between the island’s impoverished locals and the idle wealthy who winter on their yachts, the book blends adventure, social critique, and a study of survival under pressure. Hemingway assembles the narrative from interlinked episodes that expose how economic desperation erodes law, ethics, and the self.

Setting and Structure
Key West and nearby Cuban ports form a harsh, salt-bitten world where weather, reefs, and patrol craft make every crossing a wager. The structure shifts from close focus on Harry to a widening panorama of voices, locals, cops, drunks, yacht people, and hangers-on, creating a collage of the “haves” and the “have nots.” The sea binds these lives; it is livelihood and escape, stage and judge.

Plot Summary
Harry begins as a charter captain guiding rich sportsmen after big fish. When a client skips out on payment at the end of a trip, Harry’s already precarious finances collapse. With a wife, Marie, and children to feed, he takes a risky job running contraband from Cuba. Each crossing hardens him. Smuggling people or liquor blurs into violence as double-crosses, corrupt officials, and the Coast Guard narrow his options. He insists he is not a criminal by nature; he is a man forced by circumstances, trying to keep his boat afloat and his family housed.

As legal work dries up, the risks escalate. Harry makes and loses allies among bartenders, bait-cutters, and small-time operators. He reads weather, tides, and men with the same wary economy: trust little, move fast, pay cash. The jobs turn uglier. Bullets and bruises accumulate. He pushes back against betrayals with a cold, practiced decisiveness, but each reprisal costs him, and the margins, fuel, hull, blood, keep thinning.

In the closing movement he takes aboard armed Cuban revolutionaries. The money is too good to refuse; the danger is obvious. The crossing becomes a running fight in the dark. Harry’s seamanship and ruthlessness pull him through, but he is badly wounded. He brings the boat home on nerve and knowledge, bleeding and exhausted, and the aftermath unfolds in terse, unsentimental scenes that fix him among the island’s working poor, people who know the cost of getting by.

Characters and Perspectives
Harry is flinty, resourceful, and proud, defined by competence and a stripped-down code of responsibility. Marie’s voice, tender and plainspoken, counters the novel’s violence with domestic stakes and a sense of what Harry’s risk-taking is for. Around them drift the rich on their yachts, restless, adulterous, or bored, whose private dramas play out against a backdrop of cocktails and idleness. Their glancing contact with Harry’s world underlines the book’s moral and economic divide.

Themes
The title’s division animates every page: those who have money, status, and time float insulated lives; those who do not barter danger against hunger. Necessity erodes legality, turning smuggling from crime into survival and complicating the idea of guilt. Masculinity appears as competence under pressure rather than swagger, a matter of doing the job in bad weather and taking the consequences. The sea represents both freedom and fate; it offers opportunity yet enforces a brutal accounting.

Style and Effect
Hemingway writes in hard, clean sentences that carry the slap of wind and water, the weight of gear, the hush before gunfire. Dialogue drives much of the action, and shifts in viewpoint widen the moral field without losing the immediacy of the chase. The result is a bleak, propulsive portrait of a man squeezed by the times and a community divided by what can be bought and what must be risked to keep living.