To Have and Have Not.

To Have and Have Not (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937) is Ernest Hemingway's fourth novel and the only one set entirely in the United States — or more precisely, in the sun-bleached, Depression-wracked world of Key West, Florida, and the waters between there and Cuba — and it occupies a somewhat anomalous place in the Hemingway canon as a work of considerable cultural impact whose literary reputation has never quite matched its commercial success. Written in piecemeal format during his travels and originally published as two separate short stories and a novella, the novel's disjointed structure is apparent in the continuity of its plot — a structural vulnerability that critics seized upon immediately. Delmore Schwartz harshly dismissed it as a stupid and foolish book, a disgrace to a good writer, and many other critics shared this sentiment, yet the novel underwent four printings within its first two months, remained on the bestseller list from October to December 1937, sold 36,000 copies in its first five months, and earned Hemingway his first cover feature on Time magazine. Kirk Curnutt has aptly described it as that rare example of a novel whose cultural impact far outweighs its critical reputation, and its influence on American popular culture extended well beyond the page: Howard Hawks's celebrated 1944 film adaptation, starring Humphrey Bogart and introducing Lauren Bacall in her screen debut, departed so substantially from its source material — retaining little beyond the title and the Caribbean setting — that it effectively became an independent work, and it is Hawks's film rather than Hemingway's novel that most readers unconsciously recall when the title is invoked.