In an April 24, 2017 article published on Signature: Making Well-Read Sense of the World, Tom Blunt speaks, well, bluntly about how common it is “for authors to end up creatively sharpening their claws on each other,” with writerly rivalries spawning “some of history’s most savage put-downs, capitalizing on the fragile egos and insecurities that haunt anyone who pushes together words for a living.”

Keats “throws shade” at Byron, and Byron throws it back . . . after Keats’s death. H.G. Wells criticizes Henry James, Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf rip Jane Austen, Dickens has something unkind to say about houseguest H.C. Andersen, Mary McCarthy minces no words in a put-down of Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker zings Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand responds to C.S. Lewis’s criticism, Vladimir Nabokov gets snarky with Edmund Wilson, Hemingway badmouths Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein badmouths Hemingway, and Salman Rushdie tosses John Updike under a (Las Vegas) bus.

The latter is attributed to a 2006 interview Rushdie gave: “Somewhere in Las Vegas there’s probably a male prostitute called ‘John Updike.'”

Read the full article:  “The Library Is Open: 13 Instances of Writers Throwing Shade at One Another.”