Ernest Hemingway's early years as a writer constituted an apprenticeship, during which he emulated a number of his elder contemporaries. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and James Joyce are among those who, it often has been asserted, contributed certain qualities to Hemingway's technique. His relationship to T. S. Eliot, however, is of a different order. At one time or another, Hemingway was a friend and an admirer of Stein, Pound, Anderson, and Joyce, but his attitude toward Eliot was consistently that of outspoken antagonism.

Despite Hemingway's generally negative personal opinion of Eliot, certain resemblances between his work and Eliot's make it clear that the novelist was nonetheless aware of Eliot's value as a poet. Even though Hemingway had said in 1923 that he could not stand The Waste Land, he revealed his ambivalence toward it and, more significantly, his artistic indebtedness as to it, in his own works...