Hemingway - racist??? [View all]
I'm taking a trip to Key West and Cuba next year and figured this would be a good excuse to read some Hemingway again. I just finished 'To Have and Have Not' and must say that I was put off by the racist references he usued
In the first chapter a limo driver was simply referred to as 'the n****r', later on the deckhand on Harry Morgan's boat was again referred to as 'the n****r', and some Chinese men whom Harry Morgan was supposed to smuggle into the US were 'C***ks'.
It's been quite a few years since I'd read any Hemingway and I don't seem to recall this in the other books of his I'd read. SO.... I'm wondering what others who are more scholarly than myself think of this - was Hemingway simply a racist, or did he use racist language in order to portray the way that whites talked and thought at the time?
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