4 Literary Families who Sabotaged Each Other’s Careers

Martin and Kingsley Amis
Every Father’s Day we take a moment to celebrate the strong, supportive father figures who have taught us life skills, loaned us the family car, and imparted hard-won wisdom. And then there’s Kingsley Amis, a celebrated author who regularly insulted his equally famous son’s literary talent, denouncing his work for “breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to [it]self.” The relationship between father and son was complicated, and Martin Amis seems to have adopted the position that his father was simply offering honest, tough-love opinions about his work. Still, it’s remarkable to think that a father who had achieved all manner of literary success would publicly dismiss his own son’s achievements instead of simply holding his tongue.

Evelyn, Auberon, and Alec Waugh
Evelyn Waugh is one of the most celebrated writers of all time, with books like Brideshead Revisited lodged firmly in the global imagination. Many have forgotten that there was a time when his older brother Alec was the more famous writer; The Loom of Youth made a huge splash in 1917, and Alec continued to publish throughout his life, even as his younger brother overtook him in reputation. When Alec’s novel Island in the Sun became a big hit 40 years after Loom, Evelyn damned it with faint praise, saying it was “rather good if you think of it as being by an American, which he is really” (trust us when we say Evelyn Waugh describing you as “American” was a terrible insult). Evelyn’s son Auberon summed up the family’s opinion of Alec’s literary output with the Britishly savage quip that Alec “wrote many books, each worse than the last.” As with all things British, you kind of have to translate that through a Sick Burn Filter to get a real sense of just how brutal a takedown it was meant to be.

Margaret Drabble and A.S. Byatt
Sisters Drabble (The Pure Gold Baby) and Byatt (Possession) have between them won dozens of awards, sold a mess of books, and earned literary reputations many would kill for. They also, in no uncertain terms, hate each other. They throw shade at one another in both interviews and in their fiction, and haven’t spoken in decades except through withering insults offered up in interviews. Neither ever fails to say something negative—sometimes openly hostile —when the other publishes a new book. The product of an intensely unhappy and ultra-competitive upbringing, each remembers the other being mother’s favorite, and resents it with a passion. It’s entirely possible that, had the sisters evolved different artistic interests, they’d have maintained a relationship. With both of them pursuing storied literary careers, however, their sibling rivalry was doomed to blossom into something that can be culled only with fire and blood.

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath
Ted Hughes is simultaneously one of the most celebrated poets of the modern age and a reviled figure in the literary world of literature, as many—without any hard evidence, it should be noted—believe he was in some way responsible for his wife Sylvia Plath’s death. Plath committed suicide, yet many believe Hughes’ treatment of her drove her to that final, desperate moment. While Hughes had nothing but sincere-sounding praise for his wife’s genius, his handling of her manuscripts and unpublished material after her death was questionable at best; he admitted burning Plath’s journal, which detailed their final months together, and his curation of her work has been met with severe criticism over the ordering of poems and the choice of what to publish and what to keep private. The argument that Hughes hurt Plath’s literary reputation with his decisions after her death leads naturally to the conspiracy theory that he did so purposefully, either to conceal his own bad behavior while she was alive, or as a sort of final revenge. Obviously, Plath was a desperately unhappy person who had been attempting suicide regularly since her childhood, but when Assia Wevill, the woman Hughes had an affair with while married to Plath, committed suicide in the same manner (killing the daughter Hughes fathered with her as well), it became a lot easier to imagine that Hughes was a monster.