James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway dominated the 20th century, Joyce as a great literary writer of only four books, including the massive Ulysses, and Ernest Hemingway who became that rare writer who was a popular star and an iconic figure of the two-fisted macho artist and eventually—a Nobel Prize winner. Hemingway’s style was marked by simple declarative sentences.

It is not often that one becomes a great artist and a commercial artist simultaneously.

Hemingway had published his first book of connected stories by the time he met Joyce in Paris. Though Hemingway was stingy regarding praise of other writers except for F. Scott Fitzgerald in their early Paris days, he claimed that Joyce was “the best writer in the world.” Morton Levitt, in a discussion of Joyce’s place within the modernist movement, writes: “It cannot be entirely an oversight that of all the writers who had influenced Hemingway, Joyce is the only one whom he never needed to trash; even as an old man, Hemingway—who more than once had carried a drunken Joyce home—continued to speak of him with respect and affection (Levitt, 392).” (Ernest Hemingway and his most obvious rival, William Faulkner, never met, but both men respected each other, albeit Hemingway somewhat grudgingly).

James Joyce knew Hemingway was a gifted writer with a skill beyond his inflated image. They became drinking. buddies and developed an odd relationship. Supposedly, a drunk James Joyce picked fights and then hid behind Hemingway, a great bodyguard. They were very different in physical appearance. While Joyce was unathletic and nearly blind, Hemingway was tall and capable of sudden violent outbursts.

They were very different writers, as well.

Unlike Joyce who was so expansive in this prose, Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett, then Joyce’s secretary, edited all but essential details out.

In his Hemingway biography The Paris Years, Michael Reynolds asserts that Hemingway drew his inspiration for “Big Two-hearted River” from Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” the last story in The Dubliners. Joyce had Stephen Daedalus and Hemingway Nick Adams to narrate their semi biographical stories. “Big Two-Hearted River” is a story about the aftermath of war without the mention of war, and “The Dead” is a story that avoids any confrontation with death until the final revelation when a man realizes he has been cuckolded suddenly by his wife’s memory of a long dead lover named Michael Furey.

Hemingway’s story is set in a blackened burned-out land suggesting a bombing. His narrator, Nick Adams, describes a grasshopper:

“…As he watched the black grasshopper that was nibbling at the wool of his sock with its fourway lip, he realized that they had all turned black from living in the burned-over land. …The grasshoppers were all black now. He wondered how long they would stay that way (165).

Joyce’s story ends with a memorable passage about snow falling on Dublin, obliterating everything. Only James Joyce could have written the following lines about snow over Ireland:

“It was falling too upon every part of the churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay drifted on the crosses and headstones, on the spears of the gate, on the thorns. His soul swooned as he heard the snow falling through the universe and falling, like the descent of their end, upon all the living and the dead.”

By seeing a connection between these two stories, particularly their use of imagery, we may understand some similarities between two writers who, on the surface, are so different.

There are not many verified stories of Hemingway and Joyce carousing together, but they were drinking pals, and Ernest Hemingway did often carry the great Irish writer home.