If the "Hemingway World" is defined as the interests, values and experiences of the author, then To Have and Have Not reflects many aspects of Hemingway's perspective of his world in the mid-to-late 1930s.
Ernest Hemingway moved to Key West in 1928 after passing through it as he returned from a trip to Havana. He and his wife Pauline lived there for a number of years while he wrote the novel, and many of the people Hemingway knew in Key West appear in it. Hemingway and his friends spent a great deal of time deep sea fishing around the Keys, Bimini and Cuba; thus, he acquired a great deal of firsthand knowledge of the activities of human traffickers and smugglers.
Because the Great Depression gripped the country during Hemingway's time in Key West, he personally witnessed the divide between the "haves" and the "have nots." He observed the desperate lengths that the "have nots" endured to survive. His political ideologies were varied, but To Have and Have Not suggests a Marxist bent likely developed in conjunction with Hemingway's Republican or Loyalist leanings during the Spanish Civil War when he lived in Spain as a journalist.
The protagonist of To Have and Have Not, Harry Morgan, is presented sympathetically as a moral man, the captain of a sports fishing boat, whose unfortunate financial circumstances propel him into increasingly serious criminal behavior. After initially refusing to illegally transport Cubans to America through the Keys, Morgan becomes entangled in a scheme to traffic Chinese immigrants that leads him to commit murder. Afterward, he becomes a bootlegger and smuggles alcohol from Cuba into America, where Prohibition is federal law.
Morgan makes a series of devastatingly bad choices for himself and his family, yet Hemingway somehow makes the wealthy and socially-connected elites he encounters come off as perhaps more villainous than the protagonist.
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