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I now consider this blog to be my Juvenelia. Have fun perusing the archives, and find me at my new haunt, here.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Juicy Literary Feuds and Rivalries

In time for a new book about the Hemmingway-Fitzgerald frenemy-ship Carolyn Kellogg does a great job summing up some famous literary feuds and rivalries... or more often, sickly-close relationships gone sour.

Mentioned in the post:
*Verlaine vs Rimbaud [EBC pick: Verlaine],
*Dostoevsky vs Turvenev v Tolstoy [EBC pick: Tolstoy],
*Melville vs Hawthorne [toss-up]
*Kerouac vs Ginsberg [EBC pick: Ginsberg all the way] and more.

To which I add:
*C. Bronte vs. Austen (although it's one sided, with Charlotte B. dissing Jane A while the later was posthumous) [toss-up, obvs],
*Wordsworth vs. Coleridge [EBC pick: Coleridge of course],
and perhaps my favorite,
*Henry Fielding vs. Samuel Richardson. I can't pick a side here, but I just find it so amazing and hilarious that the libertine HF wrote TWO full-length novels, "Shamela" and "Joseph Andrews" just to mock poor puritan SR.

Any feuds I'm forgetting? I'm sure Alexander Pope must have been pissed at someone.

Fighting words: Six classic literary feuds
from Jacket Copy -

3 comments:

  1. Every time people mention the Hemmingway-Fitzgerald thing, I always think of Morley Callaghan's part in it, which we all learn in a Canadian lit class. The gist: Callaghan was a better boxer than Hemmingway, and dealt him a facer. Hemmingway then got mad at Fitzgerald, because he was referreeing and didn't stop the match when it was supposed to end.

    Did Mark Twain ever have it out with anyone?

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  2. Here's some more:
    Sylvia Plath vs. Anne Sexton
    John Irving vs. Tom Wolfe
    Gore Vidal vs. Truman Capote
    Dorothy Parker vs. Lillian Helman

    Good stuff.

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  3. Wasn't Dorothy Parker jealous of Helman because Helman was with Dashiell Hammett?

    ReplyDelete