Hemingway employed a simplistic method of writing, allowing him to bring his points across in a brief, concise manner. He also relied very heavily on dialogue thus giving his works an earthy, believable feel. Allen also focused his works on dialogue, but he opted for the play and screenplay format instead of prose. Allen was also more liberal with his use of sesquipedalians than Hemingway, due to the modern educated audience he was writing to entertain.
Both Hemingway and Allen have shown a childish use of vulgarity in their works. Hemingway managed to include almost every imaginable vulgarity in his works, sometimes even masked within seemingly innocent contexts. In A Farewell to Arms, Fred sleeps with Cathy before he really knew her. While Hemingway usually based his works on graphically violent themes, Allen based his on very adult, sexual themes. Allen's movie, Play it Again, Sam was based upon Allen Felix's failure to have any woman fall in love with him. In Mister Big, the female character was introduced as a "nudie model", and the detective accepted the case only because he lusted after her body. Then, at the play's end, she unleashed the Venus within her, hoping to catch a weak area of the detective, thus saving herself from arrest.
Allen and Hemingway both based their books upon the defeat of a main character. In Allen's Play it Again, Sam, the main character failed to obtain a date by making every mistake imaginable, from getting beat up to coming on to strong to a prostitute. No matter what he tried to do, something went wrong. Even when he eventually succeeded in obtaining a date, it was with his best friend's adulterous wife. Allen's characters usually made their own mistakes, but fate played a much more important role with Hemingway's. In Farewell to Arms, Fred lost his wife, child, and country. He made many sacrifices to obtain all those things, but fate intervened to prevent him from keeping them. In Old Man and the Sea, Santiago struggled endlessly to obtain the large fish, but, after facing an endless number of hungry sharks, all he could bring back to shore was a skeleton.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been continuing in the line of work initiated by Hemingway, and followed by Allen. All have never succeeded in absolute victory, but they all kept trying, and have never given up. Instead, every time they lost a battle, they just yelled "Cowabunga, dudes", and continued with the vulgar war.