Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 -1910) and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1962) are considered to be among a handful of the greatest American authors of their respective centuries: Mark Twain of the 19th century, and Hemingway of the 20th century. Two of these authors' greatest works, Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Ernest Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952), although different in style, theme, and subject matter, are worth comparing in terms of their authors' respective uses of imagery; metaphor, and their symbolic uses of water; friendship, and the motif of a journey or quest.

             Several general comparisons between the two authors and their works can be made. Mark Twain's and Ernest Hemingway's writing styles and choices of subject matter are distinct, but their approaches to writing are similar. Each, for example, writes honestly and often from personal experience. Mark Twain, however, is more of a humorist, while Ernest Hemingway uses little humor in his writing and is more of a journalistic-style realist. Both use naturalistic elements within their fiction, e.g., rivers; oceans, and/or other phenomena of nature, against which humankind proves relatively weak. Each author in his lifetime also took considerable social risks with the subject matter they chose: in Mark Twain's case the anti-slavery motif developed in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and in Hemingway's case, the daring (for the early 20th century) sexual explicitness and/or clear sexual inferences in his first novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), and some of his short stories, e.g., "Hills Like White Elephants" (1938). .

             In terms of location, both Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952) take place mostly on or near the water: the first, along or on the Mississippi River, and the second within and along the Atlantic Ocean off Cuba.