Writers Who Were Complete Assholes: Literary Geniuses You'd Want to Punch

We worship their books. We quote their wisdom. We name our children after their characters. But here's the dirty little secret English professors won't tell you: many of literature's greatest minds were absolutely insufferable human beings. The kind of people you'd cross the street to avoid. The kind who'd steal your girlfriend, insult your mother, and then write a bestseller about it.

So pour yourself something strong, because we're about to drag some literary legends through the mud they so richly deserve.

Let's start with Ernest Hemingway, that testosterone-soaked icon of American literature. Sure, 'The Old Man and the Sea' is a masterpiece. But Papa Hemingway was a raging narcissist who bullied other writers, abandoned friends when they needed him most, and treated his four wives like interchangeable accessories. He publicly mocked F. Scott Fitzgerald's masculinity, suggesting his equipment was inadequate. He betrayed mentors who helped launch his career, including Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, satirizing them viciously once he no longer needed their connections. The man shot animals for fun, drank enough to kill a rhinoceros, and once head-butted Wallace Stevens in a fistfight. Charming.

Speaking of Fitzgerald, let's not pretend he was some innocent victim. The author of 'The Great Gatsby' was a spectacular mess who used his wife Zelda's personal diaries and letters—without permission—as material for his novels. When Zelda tried to write her own book about their marriage, Scott threw a fit and demanded her psychiatrist forbid it. He literally tried to suppress his mentally ill wife's creative voice because it competed with his narrative. He was also a racist, an anti-Semite, and a falling-down drunk who crashed parties and started fights. But hey, great prose style.

Now let's talk about the undisputed heavyweight champion of literary assholes: V.S. Naipaul. This Nobel Prize winner openly admitted to beating his mistress. He called other writers 'ridiculous' and 'frauds' with gleeful regularity. He dismissed entire literary traditions—calling Indian literature 'nothing' and African literature practically worthless. When asked about women writers, he said he could tell within a paragraph if something was written by a woman because of its 'sentimentality' and 'narrow view of the world.' His own publisher once described him as 'a shit.' Not in private. In print.

Charles Dickens, that beloved chronicler of Victorian England's social ills, was himself a walking social ill. After his wife Catherine bore him ten children over twenty years, he dumped her for an eighteen-year-old actress. But that's not the worst part. He then launched a public campaign to destroy Catherine's reputation, planting stories in newspapers suggesting she was mentally unfit and a bad mother. He banned her from seeing her own children. The man who wrote so tenderly about orphans and the abandoned treated his own wife like garbage. Irony, thy name is Charles.

Philip Roth, giant of twentieth-century American letters, managed to be so horrible that his ex-wife Claire Bloom wrote an entire memoir about what a nightmare he was. According to her, he was emotionally cruel, pathologically self-absorbed, and made her sign a prenup that essentially left her destitute if they divorced—which they did, after he allegedly kicked her out during a panic attack. Multiple women have described his casual cruelty. But sure, let's keep celebrating 'Portnoy's Complaint.'

Let's hop across the pond to Roald Dahl, beloved author of children's books like 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' and 'Matilda.' Surely the man who gave us those whimsical tales was a sweetheart? Nope. Dahl was an anti-Semite who gave interviews saying things like 'there's a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity.' His own family eventually had to issue a public apology for his views—after his death, of course. He was also legendarily difficult, cruel to illustrators, and terrifying to work with.

Patricia Highsmith, who gave us 'The Talented Mr. Ripley,' was herself talented at being repulsive. She kept snails as pets, once bringing a purse full of them to a party. Fine, eccentric. But she was also viciously racist and anti-Semitic, keeping notebooks filled with hateful rants. She alienated virtually everyone who knew her and died alone, having pushed away anyone foolish enough to care about her. Her biographers describe a woman of extraordinary spite.

William Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife Joan during a drunken game of 'William Tell' in Mexico City in 1951. He aimed a gun at a glass on her head and missed. He fled to avoid prosecution and later claimed this tragedy made him a writer. Cold comfort for Joan, one imagines. He spent the rest of his life doing heroin, writing about doing heroin, and being celebrated as a countercultural hero.

Norman Mailer stabbed his second wife Adele at a party in 1960, nearly killing her. She declined to press charges, and Mailer went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes. He ran for mayor of New York. He head-butted Gore Vidal on television. He said women should be kept in cages. The literary establishment shrugged.

So what's the takeaway here? Maybe that genius and decency are unrelated qualities. Maybe that we've always been far too willing to forgive artists their sins because we love their art. Or maybe it's simpler: some people are just assholes who happen to write well.

The uncomfortable truth is that the bookshelf is full of monsters. The hands that wrote the words that moved you to tears might have been the same hands that hurt someone. The mind that crafted sentences of crystalline beauty might have harbored thoughts of breathtaking ugliness. Literature doesn't make people good. It just makes them quotable.

Next time you pick up a classic, maybe pour one out for all the wives, mistresses, friends, and colleagues these geniuses trampled on their way to immortality. They're the real tragic heroes of literary history—unnamed, unremembered, and definitely uncompensated.