Monday, June 20, 2011

The thirty harshet author insults

Ed here: Carol sent me the link to thirty author insults. Here are some samples as well as the link.

10. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe (1876)

“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”

9. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac

“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

8. Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger

“I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”

7. D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (1923)

“Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’….One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”

6. W. H. Auden on Robert Browning

“I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”

5 comments:

Cap'n Bob said...

I heard Capote said the same about Jackie Suzanne.

Ed Gorman said...

Yeah by the end he was so loaded and drugged he was repeating himself. I don't think he was ever a great writer but he was a very good one for many years but he was a sad wasted guy by the end.

Cap'n Bob said...

BTW, Ed, I can't see any link.

eddie lydecker said...

ALL geezers have sexual fantasys about twelve-year-old girls its just that our society is in denial about that in this "THE TIME OF SEXUAL REPRESSION" that we were all unfortunate enough to be born into.

Brendan DuBois said...

This is what Mark Twain said of James Fenimore Cooper's "The Deerslayer":

"It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language."


Man, could Twain write.

By the by, here's the link:

http://flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history