{"id":4071,"date":"2011-06-20T23:59:01","date_gmt":"2011-06-21T06:59:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bspcn.com\/?p=4071"},"modified":"2011-06-21T02:14:34","modified_gmt":"2011-06-21T09:14:34","slug":"the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/2011\/06\/20\/the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history\/","title":{"rendered":"The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History"},"content":{"rendered":"

Collected Emily Temple<\/a><\/p>\n

Sigh. Authors just don\u2019t insult each other like they used to. Sure, Martin Amis raised some eyebrows when he claimed he would need brain damage<\/a> to write children\u2019s books, and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan made waves when she disparaged<\/a> the work that someone had plagiarized, but those kinds of accidental, lukewarm zingers are nothing when compared to the sick burns of yore. It stands to reason, of course, that writers would be able to come up with some of the best insults around, given their natural affinity for a certain turn of phrase and all. And it also makes sense that the people they would choose to unleash their verbal battle-axes upon would be each other, since watching someone doing the same thing you\u2019re doing \u2014 only badly \u2014 is one of the most frustrating feelings we know. So we forgive our dear authors for their spite. Plus, their insults are just so fun to read. Click through for our countdown of the thirty harshest author-on-author burns in history, and let us know if we\u2019ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!<\/p>\n

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30. Gustave Flaubert on George Sand<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cA great cow full of ink.\u201d<\/p>\n

29. Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.\u201d<\/p>\n

28. Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cA hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.\u201d<\/p>\n

27. Harold Bloom on J.K. Rowling (2000)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cHow to read \u2018Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\u2019s Stone\u2019? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

26. Vladimir Nabokov on Fyodor Dostoevsky<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cDostoevky\u2019s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity \u2014 all this is difficult to admire.\u201d<\/p>\n

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25. Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cA village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.\u201d<\/p>\n

24. Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAll raw, uncooked, protesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

23. H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAn idiot child screaming in a hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n

22. Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cFilth. Nothing but obscenities.\u201d<\/p>\n

21. Lord Byron on John Keats (1820)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cHere are Johnny Keats\u2019 piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom\u2026 No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don\u2019t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.\u201d<\/p>\n

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20. Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI cannot abide Conrad\u2019s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.\u201d<\/p>\n

19. Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMr Kipling \u2026 stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

18. Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMiss Austen\u2019s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.\u201d<\/p>\n

17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cReading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 \u2014 the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that \u2018Don Quixote\u2019 could do.\u201d<\/p>\n

16. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI grow bored in France \u2014 and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire\u2026the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.\u201d<\/p>\n

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15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cHe has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.\u201d<\/p>\n

14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cPoor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?\u201d<\/p>\n

13. Gore Vidal on Truman Capote<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.\u201d<\/p>\n

12. Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThere are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.\u201d<\/p>\n

11. Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway (1972)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAs to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early \u2018forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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10. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe (1876)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAn enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.\u201d<\/p>\n

9. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s not writing, that\u2019s typing.\u201d<\/p>\n

8. Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?\u201d<\/p>\n

7. D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (1923)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cNobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like \u2018Moby Dick\u2019\u2026.One wearies of the grand serieux. There\u2019s something false about it. And that\u2019s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!\u201d<\/p>\n

6. W. H. Auden on Robert Browning<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn\u2019t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.\u201d<\/p>\n

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5. Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.\u201d<\/p>\n

4. Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI haven\u2019t any right to criticize books, and I don\u2019t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can\u2019t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read \u2018Pride and Prejudice,\u2019 I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201c[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. William Faulkner on Mark Twain (1922)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cA hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

1. D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce (1928)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMy God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bonus:I recently found this letter Mr. Rogers wrote to me when I was 6.<\/h3>\n

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Collected Emily Temple Sigh. Authors just don\u2019t insult each other like they used to. Sure, Martin Amis raised some eyebrows when he claimed he would need brain damage to write children\u2019s books, and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan made waves when she disparaged the work that someone had plagiarized, but those kinds of accidental, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4071"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4072,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4071\/revisions\/4072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}