Think the art of the dig is reserved for grouchy old man Muppets and that snarky Joel McHale? Think again! Writers have been harping on each other for hundreds of years. I got a chuckle from “The Ten Best Put-Downs in Literary History” found here on this college blog. I guess the message is: you can’t please everyone. Especially the Russians.
The Highlights:
“Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” – Mary McCarthy on Lilian Hellman
…he said reading Pride and Prejudice made him wish he could “dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” – Mark Twain on Jane Austen
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” – William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
“A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac!” – Vladimir Nabokov on James Joyce
Continue to the full article.
