"Hardboiled" is an adjective for the style of Earnest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett. Rarely have critiques these days said that their styles are similar because Hemingway is a Nobel Prize winner and is supposed to be a greater artist, who has been influenced by eminent modernists such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, than Hammett, who is just a detective story writer from a pulp magazine for the lowbrow. Both of them, however, definitely shared the same Zeitgeist after World War I, which led to a nihilistic resignation to the destroyed identity and the consequential isolation from the community. Their "hardboiled" style could unexpectedly be born from the same root in the different places, Paris and San Francisco in the 1920s