War Of Words: Famous Feuds Between Authors

Over the years there have been a number of intense rivalries in the world of fiction. Some amount to a scathing putdown or a pithy reply while others last for decades and lead to actual fights. We looked at some of the more famous incidents in the history of literature.
Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal
Perhaps the most infamous feud between authors is that of 20th century intellectual behemoths Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. Mailer, had a illustrious career culminating in the Pulitzer Prize win for The Executioner’s Song. Vidal, enjoyed a long career in both non-fiction and fiction novels and even courted political office on a couple of occasions. Neither man was exactly known for holding back their opinions and when the two crossed paths it created a rivalry that produced some legendary stories.
It was Vidal who drew first blood by drawing the less than favorable comparison between Mailer’s Prisoner of Sex and “three days of menstrual flow” and the writer to serial killer Charles Manson. Mailer, in return, repaid Vidal with a head butt backstage of The Dick Cavett Show.
Six years later, their war of words turned physical once more. Mailer threw a drink at Vidal at a party before punching him square in the face. Vidal had the last laugh though. Sprawled out on the floor, he still managed to hand out of the harshest burns in literary history when he said, “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer.”
William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway
William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway are considered greats of American literature, and rightfully so. Both authors were recipients of the Pulitzer Prize and have long bibliographies full of classics. Hemingway most popular books for The Old Man And The Sea and A Farewell To Arms, while Faulkner’s highlights included As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!
Hemingway was famous for his short and deceptively simple sentences, while Faulkner wrote challenging stream-of-consciousness prose. In fact, he held the title in the Guinness Book Of Records for the longest sentence in literature. It was this difference in style that would be the source of their feud.
Faulkner, when asked to rank his contemporary writers, said of Hemingway, “He has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary.”
Hemingway’s response was equally critical of Faulkner. “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
These two select quotes are often repeated and have gone down in literature history. The truth is, however, that besides this back and forth, there was not much rivalry between the authors. In fact, in the interview that Faulkner was quoted in, he had just ranked Hemingway as the fourth greatest writer of his time. Ahead of the likes of John Steinbeck. Faulkner was especially full of praise for The Old Man And The Sea, a book which he described as ‘His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries.” Hemingway for his part, often referred to Faulkner as ‘the best of us all”.
Brett Easton Ellis and David Foster Wallace
One of the more controversial war of words between authors in recent times, is quite unique in that one of the authors was unable to defend himself on the account of, well, being dead.
When David Foster Wallace committed suicide at the age of 46 in 2008, there was an outpouring of tributes for the Infinite Jest author. Dave Eggers called his work “world changing” and according to Zadie Smith, he “was an actual genius”.
Not all his contemporaries were quite as complimentary. Brett Easton Ellis, the outspoken author of classics such as Less Than Zero and American Psycho, took to Twitter to lay into Foster Wallace. His rant included mockingly referring to the author as “Saint David Foster Wallace”, calling him “a fraud” that “carried around a literary pretentiousness” and referring to those that read novels of his as “Fools”.
It was quite an astonishing attack on a man that had just died and was not able to defend himself. Yet, if we dig into the archives of his essays, we can find that Foster Wallace didn’t think much of Easton Ellis either. In 1988’s Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young, in reference to writers like Easton Ellis he wrote, “The attitude betrayed is similar to that of lightweight neo-classicals who felt that to be non-vulgar was not just a requirement but an assurance of value, or of insecure scholars who confuse obscurity with profundity. And it’s just about as annoying.”