When dead white guys attack! Literary history's harshest Author-on-Author violence!


From Flavorwire: The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History! My personal favorite is Mark Twain smackdown on Jane Austen circa 1898:
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
Don't worry. Girls give as good as they get. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce:
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
That's gotta hurt.

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Comments

Nowadays, the really nasty authors just sign up for fake Amazon accounts and post scathing reviews of their rival! Not that I personally know anyone like this, but I've heard rumors...