To Have and Have Not: Hemingway’s Hard-Boiled Key West Novel

Ernest Hemingway wrote much of “To Have and Have Not” while living in his beloved Key West home in the 1930s, and the island and the Gulf Stream run all through it.

The novel follows Harry Morgan, a fishing-boat captain pushed by hard times into running contraband between Cuba and the Keys. It is Hemingway’s only novel set largely in the United States, a lean, weathered portrait of Depression-era Florida.

Readers meet a Key West of docks, bars, and working boats far from today’s tourist strip, drawn by a writer who knew those streets and waters first hand.

For anyone curious about Old Key West and the writer who made it famous, “To Have and Have Not” is an essential, salt-sprayed Florida read.