Literary Rivals

Novelists, poets, and playwrights live double lives. When they fall out with each other they seem to do so with great passion. This highly entertaining book looks at some of the most complex friendships and enmities in literary history and examines the dramatic effects on literature itself. Grudge matches covered here include Vladimir Nabokov against Edmund Wilson; Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Virginia Wolfe, and John Updike against each other; Ernest Hemingway's spectacular and very public falling-out with former friends Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas; Lillian Hellman against Mary McCarthy; plus many more.

Richard Bradford is professor of English and a senior distinguished research fellow at the University of Ulster.