25 Legendary Literary Feuds, Ranked / Emily Temple

They don’t make literary feuds the way they used to. Maybe authors are kinder than they used to be—or maybe they just have Twitter. Either way, I love to hear about author feuds of yore, and so I’ve collected (and ranked) twenty-five of the best below.
But first, some rules. In order to qualify as a literary feud, both parties must be literary authors in their own right (no editor-author squabbles), and the argument must be two-sided—that is, there should be at least one exchange, two shots fired. No simple unremarked-upon bad review or unacknowledged shit-talking will suffice. For instance, Bret Easton Ellis’s bizarrely vicious attacks on David Foster Wallace in the years after his death don’t rate, because Ellis is just trolling. As far as I can tell, Mark Twain simply bullied Bret Harte, who kept his mouth shut about the whole thing. The Rick Moody/Dale Peck incident—already toeing the line as Peck, while a novelist, is arguably better known as a critic—devolved into a publicity stunt. I wouldn’t count Hans Christian Andersen overstaying his welcome at Charles Dickens’s house a feud, no matter how bad his manners. Same goes for Rimbaud and Verlaine’s gun-toting lovers’ quarrel. And alas, I must also exclude Ayelet Waldman’s 2011 Twitter-salvo to Katie Roiphe: “I am so BORED with Katie Roiphe’s ‘I like the sexist drunk writers’ bullshit. She happily trashes my husband, but guess what bitch? He not only writes rings and rings and rings around you, but the same rings around your drunken literary love objects.” (Oh look, there, I included it. Hey, no wonder Roiphe doesn’t like Twitter.) On the other hand, some writers have had so many good feuds (ahem, Salman Rushdie) that I’ve had to pick and choose from among them (John le Carré over Mo Yan; Updike over Francine Prose). Which only reminds me that I’m carrying on in this introduction, so now, without further ado, please find below twenty-five fascinating author feuds from the last 200 years. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/25-legendary-literary-feuds-ranked/

Ernest Hemingway vs. William Faulkner
John Keats vs. Lord Byron
Jennifer Weiner vs. Jennifer Egan  
John Updike vs. Salman Rushdie
Ernest Hemingway vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald
A.S. Byatt vs. Margaret Drabble
H.G. Wells vs. Henry James
Derek Walcott vs. V.S. Naipaul
Richard Ford vs. Alice Hoffman
Ernest Hemingway vs. Wallace Stevens
Marcel Proust vs. Jean Lorrain
Albert Camus vs. Jean-Paul Sartre
William Thackeray vs. Charles Dickens
Colson Whitehead vs. Richard Ford
John Irving vs. J.P. Donleavy
Truman Capote vs. Gore Vidal
Sinclair Lewis vs. Theodore Dreiser
Gabriel García Márquez vs. Mario Vargas Llosa
Paul Theroux vs. V.S. Naipaul
Vladimir Nabokov vs. Edmund Wilson
Martin Amis vs. Julian Barnes
John le Carré vs. Salman Rushdie
Mary McCarthy vs. Lillian Hellman
Tom Wolfe vs. John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving
Norman Mailer vs. Gore Vidal