Blood on the Bookshelf: The Nastiest ... | Article

Blood on the Bookshelf: The Nastiest Feuds in Literary History

Writers are supposed to be civilized creatures — lovers of beauty, seekers of truth, polishers of prose. Right? Wrong. The history of literature is a blood-soaked battlefield where egos clash like tectonic plates, insults fly sharper than any editor's red pen, and grudges outlast entire literary movements. Forget Twitter flame wars — these people destroyed each other with quill and ink, and they did it with style.

From Tolstoy calling Shakespeare a fraud to Hemingway punching his way through every friendship he ever had, the literary world has never been short on drama. So pour yourself something strong, settle in, and let me walk you through the most savage, petty, and occasionally hilarious feuds that shaped the books on your shelf.

Let's start with the heavyweight championship of literary hatred: Leo Tolstoy versus William Shakespeare. Yes, the man who wrote War and Peace — arguably the greatest novel in human history — spent decades publicly trashing the most celebrated playwright who ever lived. In his 1906 essay "On Shakespeare and the Drama," Tolstoy called Shakespeare's works "crude, immoral, and vulgar." He said King Lear was so bad it made him feel "an irresistible repulsion and tedium." Tedium! From a guy who wrote a 1,200-page novel about the Napoleonic Wars! Scholars have argued this was really about Tolstoy's late-life spiritual crisis — he wanted art to serve moral truth, and Shakespeare was too messy, too human, too gloriously ambiguous for that. But honestly? I think Tolstoy was just jealous that Shakespeare could do in five acts what took him five hundred pages.

Then there's the feud that launched a thousand literary biographies: Ernest Hemingway versus F. Scott Fitzgerald. These two started as genuine friends in 1920s Paris. Fitzgerald championed Hemingway's early work, introduced him to his editor Maxwell Perkins, and basically helped launch his career. How did Hemingway repay him? By mocking Fitzgerald's masculinity in "A Moveable Feast," publicly humiliating him over his drinking, and — in perhaps the most infamous low blow in literary history — writing about measuring Fitzgerald's penis in a Paris restaurant bathroom. Fitzgerald, for his part, was too drunk and too broken to fight back effectively. The saddest part? Fitzgerald genuinely admired Hemingway until the day he died in 1940. Hemingway outlived him by twenty-one years and never stopped taking shots at a dead man's reputation.

Mark Twain, America's beloved humorist, was a world-class hater. He despised Jane Austen with a passion that bordered on the unhinged. "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone," he wrote. He also said, "I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader." Now, Twain scholars will tell you this was partly performative — the man loved a good provocation. But there's genuine aesthetic revulsion there too. Twain valued directness, plain speech, and the rough poetry of the American vernacular. Austen's drawing-room intricacies must have felt like being trapped in a porcelain music box.

The Vladimir Nabokov–Edmund Wilson feud is a masterclass in how intellectual friendships curdle. These two were close for decades — Wilson, America's most powerful literary critic, helped the Russian émigré navigate the American publishing world. They exchanged hundreds of warm, witty letters. Then Nabokov published his controversial translation of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" in 1964, and Wilson savaged it in The New York Review of Books. He attacked Nabokov's English — which, for a man who had reinvented himself as one of the language's greatest stylists, was a mortal insult. Nabokov fired back with surgical precision, exposing Wilson's lack of Russian competency. Their published exchange reads like two brilliant professors trying to murder each other with footnotes. The friendship never recovered.

Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman gave us what might be the most quotable moment in literary warfare. On The Dick Cavett Show in 1979, McCarthy said of Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" Hellman sued for $2.25 million. The lawsuit dragged on for years, consuming both women's final years in bitterness and legal fees. Hellman died in 1984 with the suit unresolved. McCarthy, asked if she had any regrets, essentially said no. Two brilliant women, both convinced the other was a fraud, burning their last years fighting over who was more truthful. There's a novel in there somewhere — one neither of them would have written about herself.

The Romantics were just as vicious, if more poetic about it. Lord Byron and Robert Southey carried on a feud that mixed politics, poetry, and personal attacks into a toxic cocktail. Southey, the Poet Laureate, called Byron and Shelley leaders of the "Satanic School" of poetry. Byron responded in the dedication to "Don Juan" by calling Southey a sellout, a hack, and a political turncoat. He wrote: "He had sung against all battles, and again / In their high praise and glory." That's not just an insult — it's an insult in ottava rima. You have to respect the craftsmanship.

Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal turned literary feuding into a spectator sport. Their mutual loathing spanned decades, but the peak came on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 — that show really was the UFC octagon of American letters — when Mailer headbutted Vidal backstage and then spent the interview snarling at him while Vidal delivered devastating one-liners with the calm of a man ordering wine. The background? Vidal had compared Mailer's sexual politics to those of Charles Manson. Mailer had thrown a punch at a party. Vidal once said, "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little." With friends like these, literature hardly needed enemies.

So why do writers hate each other with such operatic intensity? Part of it is simple competition — there are only so many readers, so many prizes, so much shelf space. But I think it goes deeper. Writers stake their entire identity on their vision of what literature should be. When someone else's vision contradicts yours and succeeds wildly, it doesn't just threaten your career — it threatens your sense of meaning. Tolstoy didn't just dislike Shakespeare's plays; he was offended that the world revered something he found morally empty. Hemingway didn't just mock Fitzgerald; he was terrified of becoming him.

The beautiful irony? These feuds often produced some of the best writing either party ever managed. Nabokov's takedown of Wilson is a masterpiece of polemical prose. Byron's satire of Southey crackles with an energy missing from his more polite work. Even Twain's rants about Austen have a manic joy that his later fiction sometimes lacks. Hatred, it turns out, is one hell of a muse.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about literary feuds: they're not really about literature. They're about loneliness. Writing is the most solitary art form, and writers spend their lives trying to communicate something they can barely articulate to themselves. When another writer gets it wrong — when they succeed with work you consider false or lazy or morally bankrupt — it feels like the whole world has misunderstood the thing you've sacrificed everything to say. So you lash out. You write poison-pen essays and savage reviews and backstage headbutts. And centuries later, some stranger reads about it in an article and thinks: these people were magnificent lunatics. And they were. Every single one of them.