Being one of the premier literary figures of your generation can be a lonely business. None more so than for Ernest Hemingway. According to Hadley Richardson, the author's first wife, Hemingway always had trouble finding friends he could connect with "on his level, and with the same interests". But there was one notable exception: "John Dos Passos," she once told an interviewer, "was one of the few people ... whom Ernest could really talk to."

Certainly the two writers had a few significant things in common. Both born in Chicago, they each served a formative stint as an ambulance driver in Europe during World War I, distilling the experience into war novels that helped shape the postwar American consciousness. And for several decades around the mid-1900s, both would have appeared on virtually any critic's list of the greatest American novelists of the century.