The List (Part Two)

Now, a reader suggesting books to someone is one thing (not usually a dangerous thing).  A writer suggesting books is a very different creature, one that should be avoided or tranquilized as is necessary.  Writers hate other writers.  Unlike in sports or politics, there is no sort of polite respect or even love for the other team.  A list of literary rivals, tyrants and feuds will be briefly listed here:

Ben Jonson, England's first poet laureate, admired his drinking buddy Will.  He also claimed that Old Shakes had "little Latine and less Greeke" (i.e. he did not go to a proper university to truly learn the classics of these cultures).

Lord Byron dismissed John Keats as a mere Cockney poet.

Henry James hated Middlemarch.

H.L. Mencken had no time for Ernest Hemingway.

Vladimir Nabokov dismissed Zola, Balzac, Stendhal, Pasternak, Camus and Thomas Mann.

And V.S. Naipaul was disappointed with Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, William Golding...and Nabokov.

You see.  The festival of hate is eternal and ongoing.