Books

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937. Hardcover. Good. First edition. Corners bumped, wear on the spine, a couple of facing pages a little roughly opened, a good only copy lacking the dust jacket. Inscribed by Dawn Powell (as Ernest Hemingway) to herself: "To Dawn from whom all the characters in this book are drawn. Ernest Hemingway." Powell first made Hemingway's acquaintance in 1925 via Josephine Herbst and John Herrmann, and they were sociable companions in the 1930s and 40s, being frequently in the circle of Gerald and Sara Murphy. Powell based her character Andrew Callingham (in *Turn, Magic Wheel* and *A Time to Be Born*) on Hemingway. Hemingway once referred to her as his "favorite living novelist". The particular circumstances of Powell's inscription to herself in this copy of Hemingway's novel will no doubt remain elusive, as will any conformation that Hemingway had knowledge of it. But the coincidence of her 1936 novel, for which Hemingway himself provided fodder…

To Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region, and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair. Hemingway's most intriguing and tantalizing themes make their appearance: man's battle against the cruelty of nature, the pressures of society on the individual, and the existential qualities of life in the modern world.