I was amused to find a collection of "The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History" over at FlavorWire. Here are a few examples.
Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman: "... like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon."
Lord Byron on John Keats: "Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin."
Mark Twain on Jane Austen: "I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice', I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: "[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples."
There are many more at the link. Acerbically funny and entertaining reading.
Peter
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