Famous Literary Feuds: When Great Writers Hated Each Other
DAHeadbutts backstage at talk shows. Punches at literary dinners. Insults so sharp they have been quoted for over a century. The greatest writers in history were often the pettiest people alive, and their feuds are absolutely glorious.
We tend to imagine great authors as thoughtful, gentle people who sit quietly in their studies and produce beautiful prose. That image is completely wrong. Many of the most celebrated writers in history were competitive, jealous, petty, and occasionally violent. They insulted each other in reviews, at parties, in letters, on television, and sometimes with their fists.
These are not minor disagreements. These are feuds that lasted decades, destroyed friendships, and produced some of the most vicious insults in the English language. Here are the best ones.
Hemingway vs Faulkner: big words vs small ones
This might be the most famous literary feud in American history, and it boiled down to one simple question: how should a sentence sound?
William Faulkner wrote long, complex, winding sentences full of unusual vocabulary. Ernest Hemingway wrote short, punchy sentences with common words. Each thought the other's approach was fundamentally wrong.
Faulkner fired first by saying that Hemingway "has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." Hemingway's response became one of the most quoted comebacks in literary history: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
Vladimir Nabokov, never one to miss an opportunity, later piled on Hemingway as well, saying he read him for the first time in the 1940s, "something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it."
"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
- Ernest Hemingway
Mailer vs Vidal: the one with the headbutt
Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal had the kind of feud that would get a reality show commissioned today. It started when Vidal wrote an essay comparing Mailer to Charles Manson, suggesting they both viewed women as objects to be "poked, humiliated, killed." Mailer was not pleased.
At a party shortly after, Mailer walked up to Vidal and punched him. Vidal, bleeding, delivered what might be the greatest comeback in the history of physical altercations: "Once again, words fail Norman Mailer."
It got worse. They both appeared on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, and the footage is still available online. It is extraordinary. Mailer had headbutted Vidal backstage before they went on air. During the show, Mailer was belligerent and incoherent while Vidal calmly dismantled him with one-liners. The audience sided with Vidal. It was a massacre conducted entirely through wit.
Mark Twain vs Jane Austen: the most one-sided feud in history
This feud is technically unfair because Jane Austen died several decades before Mark Twain was born. She never had a chance to respond. But Twain attacked her so relentlessly and so creatively that it deserves a spot on any list.
Twain once said: "Any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book." On another occasion he wrote: "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone." He also expressed surprise that she had died of natural causes, saying she should have been executed for her "literary crimes."
Nobody knows exactly why Twain hated Austen so much. Their writing styles were completely different, and he seems to have taken her existence as a personal insult. The hatred was so extreme and so consistent that
scholars have written entire papers trying to explain it.
"Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
- Mark Twain
Dickens vs Hans Christian Andersen: the houseguest from hell
Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen were pen pals, and Andersen idolized Dickens. In 1857, Andersen managed to get himself invited to Dickens's country estate for what was supposed to be a one-week visit. He stayed for five weeks.
By all accounts, Andersen was a terrible houseguest. He spoke no English beyond what he had memorized from Dickens's novels. He was emotionally needy. He threw himself face-down on the lawn and wept when he received a bad review. The Dickens children were terrified of him.
When Andersen finally left, Dickens pinned a note in the guest room that read: "Hans Christian Andersen slept in this room for five weeks, which seemed to the family AGES." Dickens never spoke to him again and eventually stopped answering his letters entirely. Andersen never understood what went wrong.
Lewis vs Dreiser: the Nobel Prize slap
In 1930, Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Theodore Dreiser, widely considered the frontrunner, was devastated. The two had been rivals for years, and Dreiser took the loss personally.
At a literary dinner shortly after, Dreiser approached Lewis to offer congratulations. Lewis responded with what witnesses described as a sneer. During the meal, Lewis fondled a wine bottle "by the neck and muttered how he'd like to break it over Dreiser's head." When asked to give a speech, Lewis refused, standing and saying he would not speak "in the presence of the man who stole three thousand words from my wife's book."
Dreiser then walked over and slapped Lewis across the face. Twice. In front of everyone. A 1931 headline in The Montreal Gazette captured the moment perfectly: "Noted Authors in Reported Fracas."
Capote vs the Beat Generation: contempt in a high voice
Truman Capote despised the Beat writers with a passion that was almost theatrical. On the David Susskind show in 1958, he dismissed the entire movement in one sentence: "None of these people have anything interesting to say and none of them can write, not even Mr. Kerouac." When asked about Kerouac's famous On the Road, Capote delivered perhaps the most devastating one-liner in literary criticism: "That's not writing, that's typing."
Capote also fell out with his childhood friend Harper Lee after she won the Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird. Capote had been widely expected to win for In Cold Blood. When Lee won instead, the friendship was essentially over. Some literary historians believe Capote never fully recovered from the slight.
"That's not writing, that's typing."
- Truman Capote, on Jack Kerouac
Why writers fight
It is tempting to find these feuds entertaining and nothing more. But they reveal something real about the creative process. Writing is solitary, ego-driven, and deeply personal. Authors pour years of their lives into books and then release them into a world where other writers, people who understand exactly what that effort cost, will judge them publicly.
Jealousy plays a role. So does insecurity. A writer who attacks another writer's style is often defending their own choices as much as criticizing someone else's. When Faulkner mocked Hemingway's vocabulary, he was really saying: my way of writing matters. When Hemingway hit back, he was saying the same thing.
The other factor is that writers are, by definition, very good with words. Give a normal person a grudge and they will complain about it to their friends. Give a writer a grudge and they will produce an insult so perfectly constructed that people will be quoting it two hundred years later.
Great writers are not always great people. They are competitive, insecure, and capable of holding grudges for decades. But they also fight with a level of verbal precision that makes their feuds genuinely worth reading about. The insults are works of art in their own right.
If nothing else, these stories are a reminder that the books on your shelf were not created in a vacuum. They were written by real, flawed, occasionally terrible human beings who could not stand each other. And somehow that makes the books even better.
Read both sides of the argument
Add both feuding authors to your Booklogr library and decide for yourself who was right. Hemingway or Faulkner? Capote or Kerouac? Your bookshelf, your call.