Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Toni D. Knott

Critical Essay by Toni D. Knott

SOURCE: Knott, Toni D. “The Critical Reception—Through Time.” In One Man Alone: Hemingway and To Have and Have Not, edited by Toni D. Knott, pp. 11-39. Latham, N.Y.: University Press of America, 1999.

In the following essay from an anthology celebrating Hemingway's centennial, Knott reviews responses to the author's controversial novel To Have and Have Not.

Manning: “Is there anything you've written that you would do differently if your could do it over?” Hemingway: “Not yet.”

“Hemingway in Cuba,” from Bruccoli's Conversations

Expectations

Lionel Trilling's 1937 statement sounds a ring of truth today: “More than any writer of our time he has been under glass, watched, checked up on, predicted, suspected, warned” (62). By the time The Sun Also Rises (TSAR) was published in 1926, the seeds of the Hemingway legend were firmly planted, and the accompanying stream of criticism with its penchant for entanglement in E. H.'s life had begun....
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