Wars of Ink and Paper: 9 Feuds That Rocked the Literary World

Lillian Hellman vs. Mary McCarthy

“Tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and dishonest writer.…I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” This is how Mary McCarthy characterized playwright Lillian Hellman during an episode of The Dick Cavett Show that was broadcast in January 1980. What followed was a ferocious legal battle between the two American writers.

A few weeks after the episode aired, Hellman sued McCarthy, Dick Cavett, and the producer and the broadcaster of Cavett’s show for $2.25 million ($9.2 million in 2025 dollars), claiming defamation. Hellman argued that McCarthy’s comments had damaged her mentally and professionally and should have been edited out of the interview.

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McCarthy’s characterization of Hellman was anything but surprising to the leftist intellectuals in their social circles. The two women had decades of enmity, dating to the 1930s, that was sparked by their diverging stance on the Soviet Union: Hellman was a pro-Soviet communist, whereas McCarthy was a liberal anti-Stalinist. However, McCarthy maintained that her remarks on The Dick Cavett Show were not politically driven.

In May 1984 a judge decided that the lawsuit should proceed to trial, rejecting McCarthy’s defense that her assessment of Hellman was a statement of opinion regarding a public figure. All the defendants (except Cavett, who had been dismissed from the lawsuit) declared their determination to appeal this decision, but the case came to a sudden end: in late June 1984 Hellman died of cardiac arrest.

“I didn’t want her to die. I wanted her to lose in court. I wanted her around for that,” McCarthy said that summer. McCarthy was later vindicated, to some degree: in the aftermath of the lawsuit, elements of Hellman’s memoirs were identified as fabrications.

Lord Byron vs. John Keats

Although Lord Byron and John Keats are often placed side-by-side in the triptych of second-generation English Romantic poets (along with Percy Bysshe Shelley), they waged a war of disdainful words against each other during their lifetimes.

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Byron and Keats were not always feuding. In 1814, before meeting Byron, Keats wrote one of his earliest sonnets in praise of the paradoxical beauty of Byron’s melancholic poetry.

Socioeconomic differences, however, provoked tensions between the two. Byron was an aristocrat and a recognized poet, whereas Keats was a middle-class writer with financial difficulties whose poems were often attacked by the literary press, which made him jealous of Byron’s success. After reading a positive review of Byron’s work, Keats declared to a friend: “You see what it is to be 6 foot tall and a lord!” (Keats was about 5 feet tall, a fact that hit a nerve with him.) He also wrote to his brother in September 1819: “You speak of Lord Byron and me—there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees—I describe what I imagine—mine is the hardest task.”

To Byron, Keats’s rejection of poets such as Alexander Pope was unforgivable, leading him to attack the aestheticism of Keats’s poems. After reading a positive review of Keats’s work, Byron wrote to his publisher in November 1820 that “at present all the men they [the literary magazine] have ever praised are degraded by that insane article.” He also called Keats a “little dirty blackguard.”

In February 1821 Keats died at age 25 of tuberculosis. His friend Shelley blamed Keats’s early death on additional stress caused by a recent negative review of his work in The Quarterly Review. Although Keats is said to have reacted calmly to the review, Shelley’s story was an opportunity for Byron to mock Keats posthumously, by way of a short poem he included in a July 1821 letter to his publisher as well as in this stanza in his epic poem Don Juan:

John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great,
If not intelligible, —without Greek
Contrived to talk about the Gods of late,
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate:—
’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.

Despite this abuse, Byron recognized some literary merit in Keats, especially in Keats’s poem Hyperion, and he mentioned in a November 1821 letter that Keats’s death “is a loss to our literature.”

Truman Capote vs. the Swans

In his 1932 work Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway famously advised that novelists “should create living people; people not characters.” Truman Capote probably took that advice too far when he portrayed his socialite friends and revealed their secrets in “La Côte Basque, 1965,” a chapter of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers. The chapter was published in Esquire in 1975. Calling his friends “swans” and depicting them as backstabbers, Capote attracted the wrath of New York’s high society.

The friends’ reactions were varied. Among Capote’s betrayals, those of Babe Paley and Ann Woodward had the most painful, even tragic, consequences.

Paley, a former fashion editor and a sought-after socialite, was close to Capote. She reportedly revealed to him the numerous affairs of her husband, William S. Paley, which Capote mentioned in the chapter. Paley never spoke to Capote again. She died in 1978.

In 1955 Woodward, a radio actress, had accidentally shot and killed her husband, mistaking him for a prowler, as there had been several reports of a one in their neighborhood. Though she was legally exonerated, she became a social pariah in New York’s high society and subsequently suffered from depression. “La Côte Basque, 1965,” in which Capote characterized her as a cold-blooded killer (he had also previously nicknamed her “Mrs. Bang Bang”), was the coup de grâce. Days before the chapter’s scheduled publication, Woodward killed herself. Her mother-in-law, Elsie Woodward, is said to have reacted to the news by stating: “Well, that’s that. She shot my son, and Truman just murdered her, and so now I suppose we don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

Other “swans,” such as C.Z. Guest and Lee Radziwill, forgave Capote, who was nevertheless ostracized. His alcohol and drug problems worsened, and he died in 1984, never to finish the novel from which one chapter caused such tremendous scandal.

Lodovico Castelvetro vs. Annibale Caro

One day in 1553 Lodovico Castelvetro wrote a letter, which he intended to be private, that criticized a canzone by Annibale Caro. Caro’s “Venite all’ombra dei gran gigli d’oro” (“Come to the Shadow of the Golden Lily”), Castelvetro complained, was redundant, and his metaphors and vocabulary were unnecessarily embellished. Castelvetro’s unpopular opinion could have remained behind closed doors as he planned, except that the note circulated and reached Caro.

Determined to reply to what he considered a personal attack on his authority as an intellectual, Caro composed with his supporters Apologia degli Academici di Banchi di Roma (1558; “Apology of the Academicians of the Banks of Rome”). The work interleaved a defense of Petrarchism with thinly disguised insults directed at Castelvetro, one of which would prove particularly consequential: Caro called Castelvetro an “impious enemy of God” who did not believe in the afterlife.

It was not the first time that Caro had made a serious accusation against Castelvetro. In 1555 he claimed that Castelvetro and fellow poet Filippo Valentini had been involved in the murder of Alberico Longo, a scholar from the Salento region of Italy. The trial—which Castelvetro, contesting the jurisdiction, refused to attend—unfolded in Bologna, and it resulted in a death sentence for Castelvetro and the seizure of his assets.

Now with Caro’s Apologia, Castelvetro, who had also previously faced accusations of Lutheranism and heresy, was subjected to renewed scrutiny regarding his faith, leading to his summons by the Inquisition to Rome. That he was being pursued by Catholic authorities did not deter him from replying to Caro. More than a month after the Apologia’s publication, Castelvetro responded with Ragione d’alcune cose segnate nella canzone d’Annibale Caro (1559; “Reason for Some Things Noted in the Canzone of Annibale Caro”), in which he expanded on his initial critique of Caro’s poetry.

Castelvetro’s exact relationship to Lutheranism remains ambiguous. But his Lutheran sympathy and the inspiration he drew from it made him conscious that his sentence was certain to be severe, so he fled Italy for Switzerland. In 1560 he was excommunicated in absentia, and his effigy was burnt in the streets of Rome. Castelvetro remained in exile in Lyon, France, then in Geneva and Vienna, until his death in 1571.

William Faulkner vs. Ernest Hemingway

In April 1947 the lifelong rivalry between William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway reached its climax. Asked during a creative writing class to name “the five most important contemporary writers” and then rank them, Faulkner put himself first among living writers on his own list. Hemingway ended up fourth. “He has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb,” Faulkner said. “He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.”

Hemingway allegedly delivered a mocking response: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

This sparring was hardly the first between the two men, whose relationship had been already marked by competition and mutual criticism. However, a truce seemed to emerge after Faulkner’s comments, when they began writing to each other. Faulkner claimed that he meant Hemingway lacked courage as an artist, rather than as a man, and Hemingway apologized for his reaction and asked Faulkner for constructive criticism, especially regarding his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. He also asked Faulkner that they keep writing to each other, but the correspondence was short-lived and their competition soon resumed until Hemingway’s death in July 1961. Faulker continued to claim that he was the best living writer until his death the following year.

Zora Neale Hurston vs. Langston Hughes

Collaboration in literature can breed masterpieces, but sometimes it only creates feuds and lifelong bitterness. In early 1930 Langston Hughes met Theresa Helburn of the Theatre Guild, who complained to him that no Black writer had written a lighthearted comedy. Shortly after, he suggested to his friend Zora Neale Hurston that they write one together. By March 1930 they had started working on their play.

Hughes and Hurston, both rising stars of the Harlem Renaissance, had met in 1925 and even traveled together two years later to collect folktales in rural Georgia and Alabama. They had a close relationship. Hurston even once referred to Hughes as “the nearest person to me on Earth.”

Their play was based on Hurston’s folklore fieldwork as well as her unpublished short story “The Bone of Contention,” written in 1930, about a rivalry in the Black community of Eatonville, Florida. From April to May 1930, they dictated the script to Louise Thompson, a secretary Hughes had engaged. However, in May Hurston left for the summer, tasked with finishing Act 2, which they planned to refine upon her return in the fall.

In September 1930 Hurston was unwilling to resume work on the play. She avoided Hughes because of her discomfort with his relationship to Thompson and his desire for Thompson to join the pair’s collaborative effort, potentially as a business manager of a future Broadway production. Further complicating matters, by early January 1931 Hughes had severed ties with his (and Hurston’s) patron, Charlotte Mason, because of her controlling attitude. This fracture has led some commentators and scholars to ponder whether Hurston was also trying to protect her relationship with Mason by distancing herself from Hughes.

In January 1931 Hughes discovered that the Cleveland-based Black theater company Gilpin Players had received the script and wanted to stage the play. To be clear, Hurston had sent the play to writer Carl Van Vechten, and he had shared it with the theater company without her authorization. However, it was credited only to Hurston: she had filed for sole ownership of De Turkey and de Law, as she had titled the work, in October 1930. Infuriated, Hughes immediately filed for joint ownership of the script, which he titled Mule Bone. After initially blocking the production, Hurston authorized it, but she simultaneously sent a letter to Hughes claiming that nothing in the play was his.

After discussing the matter, especially Hurston’s problems with Thompson, the two writers reconciled, and the first performance of the play was set for February 15, 1931. Hurston was also to go to Cleveland to polish the work with Hughes on February 1. However, once there, she discovered that Thompson had recently visited Hughes in Cleveland, which she interpreted as Hughes and Thompson trying to sabotage the project. In reality, Thompson was in Cleveland to lead several interracial seminars. Witnessing the latest fight, the Gilpin Players decided not to stage the play.

By March 1931 both writers had definitively abandoned the play, which was eventually staged for the first time in 1991, long after their deaths. “This play was never done because the authors fell out,” wrote Hughes on the cover of the script archived at Yale University. Hurston maintained that the play was hers, writing in March 1931 to Hughes’s lawyer that “it would be lovely for your client to be a playwright but I’m afraid that I am too tight to make him one at my expense.”

Ben Jonson vs. John Marston and Thomas Dekker

This tripartite conflict, also called the war of the theatres, began in London in 1599 when John Marston satirized fellow dramatist Ben Jonson as a “Master Pedant” named Chrisoganus in his play Histrio-mastix. Jonson promptly replied by mocking Marston’s style as pompous in Every Man Out of His Humour (1599).

Until 1604 Marston and Jonson depicted each other in their plays, each escalating his attacks on the other’s literary abilities. In Poetaster (1601), Jonson insinuated that Marston was not only a failed playwright but a plagiarist too; he put Marston onstage as Crispinus, a character with red hair and small legs who was constantly resorting to pretentious expressions. In the same play, he dragged Thomas Dekker into the conflict. Dekker responded by nicknaming Jonson “the humorous poet” in Satiro-mastix (1601). Marston and Jonson eventually reconciled, and Marston even dedicated The Malcontent (1604) to Jonson.

The feud was, in large part, the result of the intense competition between children’s dramatic companies during the Elizabethan era, with Marston and Jonson writing for rival troupes.

Mario Vargas Llosa vs. Gabriel García Márquez

On the evening of February 12, 1976, Gabriel García Márquez attended the Mexico City movie premiere of La odisea de los Andes (“The Odyssey of the Andes”), a documentary about the survivors of Uruguayan Air Force flight 571. When García Márquez saw his longtime friend Mario Vargas Llosa, he opened his arms in an embrace. But Vargas Llosa shouted, “For what you did to Patricia!” and punched García Márquez, leaving him bleeding on the floor.

Patricia was Vargas Llosa’s wife.

Up until then the two writers had been close friends and vocal admirers of each other’s work. After a correspondence, initiated by García Márquez, that went on for a year and a half, they met in 1967 in Caracas. Their bond was so strong that Vargas Llosa’s second son, Gabriel Rodrigo Gonzalo, was allegedly named in honor of García Márquez and his two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo. Also in the late 1960s, Vargas Llosa taught García Márquez’s works at universities in Puerto Rico, Spain, and the United Kingdom. This experience led him to write Historia de un deicidio (1971; “History of a Deicide”), an analysis of García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude that argues writers play God by creating and killing characters.

From 1970 to 1974, they were neighbors in Barcelona. In mid-1974, as his family prepared for their return to Peru, Varga Llosa left his wife, Patricia, for a woman he met on a ship from Barcelona to El Callao, Venezuela. His wife packed their Barcelona house on her own, helped by García Márquez and his wife. The accounts then differ. Both writers never spoke about the feud’s details publicly, but some of their friends mentioned that García Márquez had advised Patricia to divorce Vargas Llosa or that she had made romantic advances toward him (or even the other way around). Regardless, by 1976, Vargas Llosa and his wife had reconciled.

“Everybody sees a sexual or erotic issue, and that may or may not have been true. But the three of them are the only ones who know that. More than a political dispute they had a separation,” Rodrigo Moya, who photographed García Márquez with his black eye two days after the altercation, told The Paris Review in 2019. Further complicating the situation, although both writers originally identified with the political left, Vargas Llosa had recently shifted to the right.

Vargas Llosa and García Márquez never spoke again. García Márquez died in 2014. Vargas Llosa kept Historia de un deicidio out of print, although he discussed García Márquez’s work in 2017, as part of a series of lectures celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. When asked about the feud, Vargas Llosa said, “We’re moving toward dangerous ground. The time has come to put an end to this conversation. I was sad when he died, it was like the death of Cortázar or Carlos Fuentes. They weren’t just great writers, but also great friends. To discover that I am the last of that generation is sad.”

Gore Vidal vs. Norman Mailer

On December 1, 1971, the most belligerent, if not notorious, episode of The Dick Cavett Show aired. As host Dick Cavett introduced the episode, Norman Mailer headbutted Gore Vidal backstage. Minutes later, the two writers walked on stage. Mailer refused to shake Vidal’s extended hand, explaining that “we were friends last time we saw each other, which is about two or three years ago, and since then we’ve been doing nothing but write atrocious things about each other.” With the two men trading writing for speech, the rest of the episode would not be an exception.

Mailer and Vidal first met in New York in 1952. Despite their initial rivalry—both had recently published war novels and Mailer’s, The Naked and the Dead (1948), was much more popular—they developed a complicated friendship. However, in a July 1971 review of Eva Figes’s Patriarchal Attitudes for The New York Review of Books, Vidal sparked a feud. Drawing on Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex (1971), which criticized the women’s rights movement, Vidal wrote: “There has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression. The Miller-Mailer-Manson man (or M3 for short) has been conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons; at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed. Needless to say, M3’s reaction to Women’s Liberation has been one of panic.”

On the show Mailer caustically attacked Vidal in reaction to that characterization, calling it a reference to the fact that in 1960 Mailer had “lightly stabbed” artist Adele Morales, his then-wife. (After an argument during a party they were hosting, Mailer, who was drunk, wounded Morales severely with a penknife.) Despite attempts by the third guest, the journalist Janet Flanner, to defuse the situation, Mailer proceeded to critique the intelligence of the audience, the guests, and Dick Cavett. (Cavett at one point responded, “Perhaps you’d like two more chairs to contain your giant intellect.”) Mailer remained focused on Vidal, to whom he said: “I’ve had to smell your works from time to time, and that has helped me become an expert on intellectual pollution.”

Six years later Vidal was attending a party in New York when Mailer confronted him yet again, leading to another physical altercation, in which Mailer threw his glass at Vidal’s face and punched him. “Norman, once again words have failed you,” Vidal commented as he got up. However, in 1984 Mailer offered a truce by inviting Vidal to accompany him to a fundraising event. They confessed that they appreciated each other to some extent, with Vidal saying that he was happy to end the feud as long as he did not have to read any more of Mailer’s books. “An element in me, absolutely immune to weather and tides, runs independently fond of you,” replied Mailer. Surprisingly, the truce held until their deaths.