The Most Savage Insults Authors Wrote About One Another

Writers have given the world some of the greatest love stories, philosophical ideas, and timeless works of art. They have also given us absolute chaos.

For people who spend their lives carefully choosing words, authors can be unbelievably brutal when talking about each other. Literary feuds are often less “professional disagreement” and more “public execution with a fountain pen.”

Mark Twain vs Jane Austen: Pure Hatred

Mark Twain’s dislike of Jane Austen has become a literary legend. In a letter to his friend Joseph Twichell dated 13 September 1898, Twain confessed that her books “madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader.” The most famous line follows: every time he read Pride and Prejudice, he wanted to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone. That sentence first appeared in print in 1920, in a Harper’s Magazine article by Twain’s friend Brander Matthews, as the Reading Experience Database records.

The fuller picture is gentler. As the Virginia Quarterly Review points out, Twain admitted to rereading Austen just to dislike her all over again. He also left an unfinished essay called “Jane Austen,” now held in the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley. For a writer supposedly repelled by her, he spent a remarkable amount of time in her company.

Oscar Wilde Absolutely Destroyed Henry James

Oscar Wilde had the kind of wit people fear sitting next to at dinner parties, and Henry James received a generous portion of it. In “The Decay of Lying,” his 1889 essay written as a dialogue, Wilde’s speaker declares that “Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.” The line belongs to a larger argument for imagination and invention, qualities Wilde felt the realists of his day had abandoned.

James had struck first. After the two men met in Washington in 1882, James privately called Wilde a “fatuous fool” and a “tenth-rate cad.” The New Republic traces their long, wary fascination.

Oscar Wilde to Whistler

Wilde’s friendship with painter James McNeill Whistler produced some of the age’s liveliest banter. In March 1882, writing from Chicago during his American lecture tour, Wilde opened a letter with “My Dear Jimmy” and announced that Whistler’s “abominable attempt at literature” had arrived.

The “literature” was a joking letter that Whistler and friends had sent him the month before. The original survives in the University of Glasgow’s Whistler correspondence, part of the world’s largest collection of Whistler’s papers. Glasgow’s Special Collections adds a lovely detail: Wilde often repeated in public witticisms that had originated with Whistler.

Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope

One of the lines most often credited to Wilde concerns the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope: “There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.” The Victorian Web places the remark among a chorus of Victorian and Edwardian critics who turned on Pope. Matthew Arnold found his poetry lacking in seriousness, and Lytton Strachey called him a “fiendishly clever and spiteful monkey.”

The original occasion for Wilde’s line is hard to pin down, so it is best enjoyed as an attribution. Readers who want to judge Pope for themselves can find An Essay on Criticism free on Project Gutenberg.

Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe

James could deliver a verdict as crisply as Wilde. In an essay on Baudelaire, first published in The Nation in April 1876 and collected in French Poets and Novelists in 1878, he wrote: “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.” He added that Poe was the greater charlatan of the two writers, and also the greater genius. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore has published the original essay online.

Time softened him. In his 1913 memoir A Small Boy and Others, the older James remembered sharing the thrill of Poe’s best pages with his brother William as boys, which scholar James W. Gargano notes in an essay for the Poe Society. 

Vladimir Nabokov Hated Almost Everybody

If literary arrogance were an Olympic sport, Vladimir Nabokov would have swept the podium. His favorite target was Fyodor Dostoevsky, whom he described in his Cornell lectures, later published as Lectures on Russian Literature, as a mediocre writer whose flashes of excellent humor were separated by “wastelands of literary platitudes.”

Elsewhere, he grouped Dostoevsky with Balzac, Stendhal and Sainte-Beuve among writers he considered mediocre and overrated, as the scholar Melissa Frazier documents on Project MUSE. She also notes that critics increasingly see Nabokov’s loud disdain for “old Dusty” as a mask for a real debt, especially in Lolita.

He was just as merciless in the interviews collected in Strong Opinions. There he dismissed “Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles,” along with Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Finnegans Wake, which he called a “petrified superpun,” as the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum recalls.

Hemingway and Faulkner’s Masculine Vocabulary War

The feud between fearless writer Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner feels like two heavyweight boxers sparring inside a library. Faulkner said Hemingway had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary, and suggested he lacked courage. Hemingway’s reply, as recorded by his friend A. E. Hotchner in Papa Hemingway (1966), became legend: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?” Hemingway later said he knew the “ten-dollar words” perfectly well and preferred older, simpler ones.

Quote Investigator notes that because the reply reaches us through Hotchner, it sits a step removed from Hemingway himself. The rivalry ended in admiration. When The Old Man and the Sea appeared in 1952, Faulkner praised it warmly, suggesting time might show it as the finest work of their generation, as Literary Hub recounts.

T. S. Eliot Declared Hamlet a Failure

In his 1919 essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” T. S. Eliot called one of the most celebrated plays in the English language “most certainly an artistic failure.”

His argument rested on an idea he made famous, the “objective correlative”: a set of objects, situations, or events that gives an emotion concrete form. Eliot believed Hamlet lacked emotional coherence and argued that Shakespeare failed to properly connect Hamlet’s feelings with the events of the story.

He wrote all about it in his essay Hamlet and His Problems. The Poetry Foundation hosts the essay in full. In the same essay, Eliot praised Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra as Shakespeare’s most assured artistic successes.

Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence vs James Joyce

Virginia Woolf’s verdict on Ulysses appears in her private diary, in an entry dated 16 August 1922, a few months after the novel’s publication. Two hundred pages in, she had enjoyed the opening chapters, then grew bored and irritated, comparing the experience to watching “a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”

She called it “an illiterate, underbred book,” a phrase that reveals as much about Bloomsbury’s class assumptions as about Joyce. The entry ends with a characteristically honest admission that she might revise her view later. The Reading Experience Database preserves the passage, and Literary Hub has gathered more of her diary barbs, including one aimed at T. S. Eliot.

D. H. Lawrence attacked the same book from another direction, calling its final section “the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written.” The irony is rich. Lawrence and Joyce had become the two most notorious banned authors in English, as Paul Delany observes in an essay on their rivalry. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, privately printed in Florence in 1928, was soon banned worldwide and was finally published openly in Britain only in 1960, after a celebrated obscenity trial.

H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw

During the First World War, H. G. Wells turned on George Bernard Shaw, whose 1914 pamphlet Common Sense About the War had outraged patriotic Britain. Wells called Shaw “an elderly adolescent still at play” and compared his commentary to an idiot child screaming in a hospital, according to a study in The Space Between.

The two had already clashed as fellow members of the socialist Fabian Society. Shaw was unfazed by the personal insults; the Los Angeles Review of Books notes that what truly bothered him was the misrepresentation of his actual position.

Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust

Evelyn Waugh read Proust in C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s English translation and didn’t enjoy it. In a letter to his friend Nancy Mitford, he reported his surprise at discovering that Proust “was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.” He went on to complain that Proust could never keep track of anyone’s age.

Writing in The Spectator, the novelist Allan Massie suspects the confusion may lie with Waugh or the translator. The exchange belongs to The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, more than five hundred letters of gossip, literary advice and mischief.

The Most Famous Line Dorothy Parker Never Wrote

And then there is Dorothy Parker, who, while reviewing an unnamed novel, produced perhaps the cleanest insult ever written: “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

Its true history is a small detective story. Quote Investigator reports that researchers have never found the line anywhere in Parker’s writing. The earliest known version appeared in a 1958 Los Angeles newspaper column by Sid Ziff, credited to an unnamed critic, and the publisher Bennett Cerf reassigned it to Parker in 1962. The joke found its way to the wittiest woman in New York, where it has lived happily ever since.

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