7 of the Best Author-on-Author Burns of All Time

Long before there were Twitter feuds and fire emojis, insults were an art form. These days, you can reflexively rage-type whatever you want, but back then? A good burn took time and care to craft. A good burn had to demonstrat artistry and wit, not just meanness. A good burn took dedication—after all, they had to be handwritten, or dictated to a secretary, or meticulously typeset to be shared with the world. Can you imagine the resolve it took to properly and publicly disparage someone?
Few people have more resolve and more words at their disposal than writers, so it’s only fitting that writers have penned some of the best burns of all time—most of them about each other. After all, if you don’t have anything nice to say about a fellow author, why not say something mean extremely eloquently?
History’s full of wildly entertaining examples, but here are some of our favorite, and harshest, author-on-author exchanges.
1. David Foster Wallace and Bret Easton Ellis
These two absolutely hated each other. David Foster Wallace said that American Psycho “panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.” Ellis tweeted, among other things, “Anyone who finds David Foster Wallace a literary genius has got to be included in the Literary Douchebag-Fools Pantheon.”
2. Mark Twain and Almost Everyone
Mark Twain had an entire library of books he marked up with corrections, criticisms, and insults directed at their authors. He took a shot at quite a few “classic” authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and George Eliot, but Twain’s words about Jane Austen are perhaps the most notable: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
3. William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway
These contemporaries of American literature didn’t mince words. Faulkner said of Hemingway, “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” Hemingway got him back with, “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
4. Truman Capote and Gore Vidal
Have any two writers ever loathed each other more? Their insults went well beyond their written work. At one point, Vidal called Capote “a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.” Capote, not to be outdone, said of Vidal, “I’m always sad about Gore—very sad that he has to breathe every day.”
5. Dorothy Parker and Clare Booth Luce
You have to hand it to these ladies, because these insults were delivered off the cuff and in person. Luce held the door open for Parker and said, as Parker walked through, “Age before beauty.” Striding past, Parker got Luce back with the retort, “Pearls before swine.”
6. Alexander Pope and Coley Cibber
If you think writers were more civilized toward each other in the early days, you’d be wrong. The 18th-century poet Pope wrote of his rival Cibber, who was appointed Poet Laureate, “Cibber, write all your verses upon glasses/the only way to save them from our arses.”
7. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal
Sometimes sitting around scribbling nasty things about each other just isn’t enough—at least, it wasn’t for Norman Mailer. Mailer got up and punched Vidal at a party after Vidal wrote a scathing review of Mailer’s work. Unfortunately for Mailer, Vidal got in one of his best burns of all time. While knocked to the floor, Vidal quipped, “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer.”