20 Famous Writers Who Crushed Their Rivals With Words

Publisher Edmund Curll had printed unauthorized poems under Alexander Pope’s name, and Pope wanted revenge. In March 1716, he invited Curll to a tavern and slipped tartar emetic, a substance that causes vomiting, into his wine. Pope later wrote a pamphlet mockingly describing the incident as a horrid poisoning, yet Curll lived another 31 years.

Jonathan Swift, writing under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff, published a pamphlet in 1708 predicting that astrologer John Partridge would die on March 29. The next day, another pamphlet confirmed his death. As a result, Partridge’s almanac business was thrown into public confusion for years, despite his insistent declarations that he was still alive. The almanac’s later suspension was actually tied to separate tax disputes, not the hoax.

The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne sold in the millions. But its 1928 review by Dorothy Parker in The New Yorker, writing under the pseudonym “Constant Reader,” mocked Milne’s cutesy spellings, namely the word “hummy,” and concluded, “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.” In other words, Parker mimicked the baby talk to say that “Constant Reader threw up.”

In 1752, Voltaire wrote Histoire du Docteur Akakia, a vicious satire aimed at Pierre Louis Maupertuis, president of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and a favorite of King Frederick the Great. The awkward part was that Frederick was also Voltaire’s royal patron. Legend inflated the print run to 30,000 copies in Paris, but historians estimate the real number of clandestine copies at only 1,000 to 3,000. Frederick was so angry at the book that he ordered it to be publicly burned, and Voltaire soon left Prussia.

Probably Shakespeare’s earliest enemy, or at least the first on record, was fellow playwright Robert Greene, who warned his university-educated fellow writers about “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers.” The insult is generally understood as a swipe at Shakespeare, an increasingly successful playwright who hadn’t attended university like Greene and his circle had. Greene died in 1592, but the manuscript was then prepared for publication by Henry Chettle, who later published what has been interpreted as an apology to Shakespeare in another pamphlet. Nobody remembers that nearly as well as “upstart Crow.”

After his exile from Florence in 1302, Dante filled his Divine Comedy with punishments for people he disliked or blamed for Florence’s political troubles. He set the story in the year 1300, a clever trick that let him place enemies who were still alive at that point among the damned, as if predicting their fates years before he actually finished writing. Pope Boniface VIII, whom Dante blamed in part for the political events surrounding his exile, is foretold a place in the Eighth Circle. He even cast his rival Filippo Argenti into Hell, where he struggles in the mud as other damned souls attack him.

In 1821, British Poet Laureate Robert Southey published A Vision of Judgement, in which he called Byron the leader of a “Satanic school” of poets. Byron responded in 1822, publishing The Vision of Judgment, in which Southey bores a group of angels and demons at the gate of Heaven until they run away. Southey remained Poet Laureate until his death in 1843; the ridicule had no effect on his tenure.

While Samuel Johnson was working on his monumental Dictionary of the English Language, he initially sought financial support from the wealthy Lord Chesterfield and received £10. Then Chesterfield largely left him to it. Seven years later, with the work almost complete, Chesterfield publicly praised the Dictionary and appeared eager to associate himself with the project. Johnson was having none of it. His famous 1755 reply described a patron as someone who watches a man struggle in the water, then, once he is safely ashore, “encumbers him with help.” Chesterfield reportedly kept the letter and showed it to visitors.

On January 13, 1898, Émile Zola published “J’Accuse” in the newspaper L’Aurore, with the famous headline supplied by editor Ernest Vaughan. Some 300,000 copies were printed, and the open letter accused the French military command of helping cover up the wrongful conviction of Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason. Zola was convicted of libel and fled into exile in England. It would be another eight years before Dreyfus’ complete exoneration.

In his 1895 essay Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses, Mark Twain laid out nineteen rules of good fiction writing, then gleefully argued that James Fenimore Cooper had broken nearly all of them in The Deerslayer. On a single page, Twain claimed, Cooper committed “114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115.” There wasn’t even an active feud to settle: Cooper had been dead for decades by then, and the two authors never met.

Sherwood Anderson had been an early supporter of Ernest Hemingway’s career, even helping him make literary connections. That didn’t save him from becoming one of Hemingway’s targets. Hemingway’s 1926 The Torrents of Spring parodies Anderson’s novel Dark Laughter and his writing style. Biographers have said that Hemingway wrote the book both to distance himself from Anderson’s influence and to get out of his existing publishing contract. The ploy worked well enough, and Hemingway went on to publish with Charles Scribner’s Sons.

During a literary war pitting Ben Jonson against John Marston, known as the “War of the Theatres” from c. 1599 to 1602, the two men traded insults in the form of their plays. In one of Jonson’s plays, Poetaster, a character based on Marston, is given an emetic potion and then vomits a basin full of affected words taken from Marston’s plays, including “retrograde” and “reciprocal”.

The word “plagiarist” comes from the Latin plagiarius, meaning kidnapper or slave-stealer. We owe its literary connection to the Roman poet Martial. Around 86 CE, he discovered that a man named Fidentinus was reciting Martial’s poems and passing them off as his own. Martial responded by comparing his stolen poems to enslaved people and calling Fidentinus a plagiarius. And that’s how a word for kidnapping eventually became a word every student learns to fear.

Roman poet Catullus had written tender love poetry, and two men named Aurelius and Furius mocked him for it, attacking his masculinity. His response, written around 54 BCE, was Catullus 16. In it, Catullus argues that a poet’s writing doesn’t necessarily reflect his character or morality, so writing gentle verses didn’t make Catullus himself gentle. His opening response to the two critics is famously and extremely obscene. Rather than being read as a literal threat, however, the language fits the Roman tradition of invective, where vicious personal insults could be used to defend one’s reputation and status.

Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were once close friends, but Pope apparently made a few pointed digs at the woman in his Imitations of Horace, where she appears as “Sappho.” Lady Mary and her friend Lord Hervey, a courtier and fellow target of Pope’s satire, wrote the 1733 Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace together. This poem references Pope’s humble origins and physical deformity. It depicts his biting satire as “harmless as a wasp without a sting.”

William Gifford was the editor of The Quarterly Review, a conservative literary journal that spent years attacking liberal writers, including John Keats and William Hazlitt. Eventually, Hazlitt decided to answer the critic directly. In an 1819 open letter to Gifford, he wrote: “You have an unnatural relish for the poison of slander. You are a little person, but a considerable nuisance.”

Poets John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell were bitter literary and political rivals. In his 1682 satire Mac Flecknoe, Dryden chose Shadwell as the fictional heir to a kingdom of terrible writers: “Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he / Who stands confirm’d in full stupidity.” Then history handed the feud a rather satisfying twist. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 cost Dryden his position as Poet Laureate, Shadwell was appointed to replace him in 1689.

Alexander Pope and actor-playwright Colley Cibber had been trading public insults for years when Pope decided to give his rival a starring role in one of his most famous satires. In the 1743 revision of The Dunciad, Pope replaced the poem’s previous central dunce with Cibber, casting him as the new hero of the goddess Dulness and effectively crowning him king of the dunces. It was brutal, but it didn’t cost Cibber his actual crown: he remained Poet Laureate until his death in 1757.

Former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan died on July 26, 1925, just days after taking part in the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial over the teaching of evolution. His death had nothing to do with journalist H. L. Mencken’s pen. But Mencken’s scathing piece about Bryan after his death, describing him as a “charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity,” helped shape the harsh image of Bryan that survived him.

After Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE, Roman statesman Cicero turned his speeches against Mark Antony, whom he saw as a threat to the Roman Republic. The Philippics were fourteen speeches attacking Antony, in which Cicero portrayed him, among other things, as a drunken tyrant. While some were delivered in the Senate, others circulated in written form. The speeches damaged Antony’s reputation, but they certainly didn’t take away his power. When Antony formed the Second Triumvirate in 43 BCE, Cicero’s name was placed on the list of enemies to be killed, and he was assassinated.

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