The 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time, Part 2

Proust: mentally defective (according to Mr.Waugh).

Missed the initial installment of the 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time? Catch up on the first 25 highly vitriolic remarks here.

And now, on with the jollity.


26. Marcel Proust, according to Evelyn Waugh (1948)

I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.


27. William Faulkner, according to Ernest Hemingway

Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You're thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes -- and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he's had his first one.


28. E.M. Forster's Howards End, according to according to Katherine Mansfield (1915)

Putting my weakest books to the wall last night I came across a copy of 'Howards End' and had a look into it. Not good enough. E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea.

And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.


29. Voltaire, according to Charles Baudelaire (1864)


I grow bored in France -- and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire...the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.


30. Charles Dickens, according to George Meredith


Not much of Dickens will live, because it has so little correspondence to life...If his novels are read at all in the future, people will wonder what we saw in them, save some possible element of fun meaningless to them.


31. Jane Austen, according to Mark Twain (1898)


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.


32. Gustave Flaubert, according to George Moore (1888)


Flaubert bores me. What nonsense has been talked about him!

33. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, according to Gore Vidal (1980)

He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.

Solzhenitsyn: "a bad novelist and a fool'

34. Ernest Hemingway, according to Tom Wolfe

Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he's easy to read is that he is concise. He isn't. I hate conciseness -- it's too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using 'and' for padding.

35. James Joyce's Ulysses, according to Virginia Woolf (1922)


I dislike 'Ulysses' more and more -- that is I think it more and more unimportant; and don't even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings. Thank God, I need not write about it.


36. William Shakespeare, according to George Bernard Shaw (1896)


With the exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity.


37. Charles Lamb, according to Thomas Carlyle


Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tomfool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners. His speech wriggles hither and thither with an incessant painful fluctuation; not an opinion in it or a fact or even a phrase that you can thank him for....


38. Edith Sitwell, according to Dylan Thomas (1934)


Isn't she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying, concealing, flipping, plagiarising, misquoting, and being as clever a crooked literary publicist as ever.


39. James Jones, according to Ernest Hemingway (1951)


To me he is an enormously skillful f#*&-up and his book will do great damage to our country. Probably I should re-read it again to give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs...I hope he kills himself....


40. Sir Walter Scott, according to Mark Twain (1883)


Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks...progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the silliness and emptiness, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.


41. Jane Austen, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1861)


I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.


42. Robert Frost, according to James Dickey (1981)


If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes....a more sententious, holding-forth old bore, who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word I never saw.


43. Tom Wolfe, according to John Irving (1999)


He doesn't know how to write fiction, he can't create a character, he can't create a situation...You see people reading him on airplanes, the same people who are reading John Grisham, for Christ's sake....I'm using the argument against him that he can't write, that his sentences are bad, that it makes you wince. It's like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine....You know, if you were a good skater, could you watch someone just fall down all the time? Could you do that? I can't do that.

Bret Harte: liar, thief, swindler, snob

44. Bret Harte, according to Mark Twain (1878)

Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth as carefully as if he considered it a disgrace. How do I know? By the best of all evidence, personal observation.


45. Thomas Carlyle, according to Anthony Trollope (1850)


I have read -- nay, I have bought! -- Carlyle's 'Latter Day Pamphlets,' and look on my eight shillings as very much thrown away. To me it appears that the grain of sense is so smothered up in a sack of the sheerest trash, that the former is valueless....I look on him as a man who was always in danger of going mad in literature and who has now done so.


46. Henry James, according to Arnold Bennett


It took me years to ascertain that Henry James's work was giving me little pleasure....In each case I asked myself: 'What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it's going to?' Question unanswerable! I gave up. Today I have no recollection whatever of any characters or any events in either novel.


47. James Fenimore Cooper, according to Mark Twain (1895)


Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.


48. Gore Vidal, according to Martin Amis (1995)


Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice -- registry offices, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the disposable diaper -- is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.


49. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, according to Edward Fitzgerald (1861)


She and her sex had better mind the kitchen and her children; and perhaps the poor; except in such things as little novels, they only devote themselves to what men do much better, leaving that which men do worse or not at all.


I did say at the start of this unending Marah that these snippets of snarkiness weren't necessarily in order. I have, however, saved my absolute favorite for the end:


50. Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, according to Norman Mailer (1998)


The book has gas and runs out of gas, fills up again, goes dry. It is a 742-page work that reads as if it is fifteen hundred pages long....


At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred pound woman. Once she gets on top, it's over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated. So you read and you grab and you even find delight in some of these mounds of material. Yet all the while you resist -- how you resist! -- letting three hundred pounds take you over.


Now, that's a non-clichéd review for you.

Alan Sillitoe: His own man

Rachel Roberts and Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Alan Sillitoe was one of the stars of the Angry Young Men, but resisted classification throughout his prolific career. With his death last week, a strand of late 20th-century literature has come to an end.
Like many a writer who elbowed his way into public notice in the 1950s, Alan Sillitoe will probably be remembered for only a tiny fraction of his considerable output. Just as Kingsley Amis's reputation, one suspects, will ultimately stand or fall on Lucky Jim (1954), so posterity will almost certainly end up judging Sillitoe's long and combative career on the basis of its two opening salvoes – the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and the high-octane short story collection The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959). The fault is not Sillitoe's, who wrote at least half a dozen novels ripe to be compared with his groundbreaking debut. Rather, it lies in the nature of the literary stage – a stage where TS Eliot featured as a grand panjandrum and Iris Murdoch as a promising ingénue – on which he took his bow.

The 1950s, lest we forget, was an age of literary sensation, a time when books were "news" and yet – as nearly always happens when books are news – the newsworthiness had very little to do with the literature itself. It was the era of the Angry Young Man (Osborne, Amis, Wain), of more or less radical literary politicking (see Declaration, the 1957 collection of art manifestos edited by the young Tom Maschler), of that notoriously problematic entity "the working-class writer", of aesthetic compacts forged between novelists and grittily realist film-makers, of a fascination – at any rate at its upper level – with the fast-dissolving popular culture described in Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957).

Sillitoe operated on the inner flank of each of these movements – he was as angry, if not angrier, than John Osborne; his first two books were filmed, respectively, by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson; the pre-war Nottingham backyards he wrote about bear natural resemblances to Richard Hoggart's Hunslet – while always remaining, sometimes to the point of defiance, his own man. On the other hand, while his starring role in the new literary vanguard brought substantial rewards – Saturday Night was one of the first million-selling Pan paperbacks – his originality wasn't always noticed by the critics, and the pigeonholing that characterised the early part of his career often got in the way of later attempts to extend his range.

Nowhere was this typecasting more flagrant than in Sillitoe's instant classification as a "working-class writer". Metropolitan journalists, summoned to pronounce on the new wave of northern novelists, many of them from comparatively humble backgrounds, tended to assume not only that they themselves were socially homogenous, but that their books reflected the same kind of backgrounds, anxieties and outlooks on life. In fact, there are at least half a dozen varieties of the 50s working-class, including the aspirational "lace-curtain working class" (Stan Barstow's phrase) rising from foundry or production line to the solicitor's office or the draughtsman's shop; the provincial bohemians of Philip Callow's Lawrence-inflected Common People (1958); the thrusting meritocrats of John Braine's Room at the Top (1957).

As for the working-class novelist, broadly speaking the paladins of the 50s northern horde belonged to a distinctive social sub-group: first-generation grammar school boys, respectful of their origins but keen to explore the world beyond the horizon. One of the most characteristic scenes in an English novel written during the period 1954-64 is the spectacle of its hero standing proudly on the station platform as he waits for the next train to London.

Set against this upwardly mobile, meritocratic tide, Sillitoe was the outsider to end all outsiders, dyed-in-the-wool Midlands underclass, large parts of whose childhood were spent pushing a handcart containing his family's possessions from one set of flyblown digs to another, whose earliest memories were of his mother yelling "Not on his head" as his illiterate father set about him with his fists, educated not at a grammar school but a secondary modern which disgorged its alumni at 14 to the Raleigh bicycle factory. Ted Hughes (with whom Sillitoe was friendly) once wrote in a letter to Christopher Reid that among the newcomers of the "Angry Decade", he "had the best barbarian credentials, except for maybe Alan Sillitoe".

All this gave Arthur Seaton, the moody, antinomian hero of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a distinctive status among the fictional protagonists of the Macmillan era. Unlike the "good" working-class characters of an earlier age, Arthur is an ambiguous figure: generous (when he has the money), affectionate towards women and incubating warm feelings towards the male friend he is quietly cuckolding, but untroubled by the moral implications of detaching a drunk from his wallet or plugging an air-rifle pellet into the cheek of a muck-raking neighbour.

The same ambiguity extends to the milieu in which Sillitoe frames him – the close, tightly knit badlands of back-street Nottingham, with its simmering resentments and neighbourhood quarrels that are always liable to end up in a mass brawl and a night in the cells. If nothing else, Saturday Night is a terrific antidote to the sentimentalising of working-class life, with its roaring fires and benignly shirt-sleeved patresfamilias, promoted by Orwell and the eternal decencies of the proletarian hearth observed by Hoggart. The Uses of Literacy, for example, insists that pre-war Hunslet offered "a good and comely life", characterised by its "sacrifice, cooperation and neighbourliness". Sillitoe thought differently. The Seatons either desert from military service or feign bad eyesight to get out of it, and sit through Churchill's patriotic radio broadcasts with stoical indifference. There is a solidarity about them, but it is the solidarity of a rebel army, born not out of any generosity of spirit but from hate and fear.

To the middle-class critic – and the middle-class reader – Arthur's surly self-centredness was a problem. Joe Lampton, the go-getting arriviste of Braine's Room at the Top, may not have been a particularly pleasant character, but at least he had ambition. Sillitoe's early work, it soon became clear, was about getting by and staying put, fighting against drift, bringing a compound of highly combustible inner resources to bear on the horrors of routine, taking refuge in daydreams: living till 90, as Arthur puts it, with a fresh piece of skirt every day. His "vitality" was his saving grace, but even this could sometimes seem horribly compromised. In John Fowles's first novel, The Collector (1964), in which a jackpot-winning municipal clerk kidnaps an art student and keeps her prisoner in his cellar, Arthur features as a talismanic symbol of the contemporary class war. Left-leaning, CND-fancying Miranda ought theoretically to sympathise with this signifier of oppression and neglect. On the contrary, she detests him. "I think Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is disgusting," she declares. "I think Arthur Seaton is disgusting, and I think the most disgusting thing of all is that Alan Sillitoe doesn't show that he is disgusted by his young man."

To Miranda, Arthur's most blatant offence is his solipsism – "he doesn't care about anything outside his own little life". Worse, "because he is cheeky, hates his work and is successful with women, he is supposed to be vital". If one of the era's critical orthodoxies was that a writer ought not to keep his moral cards quite so close to his chest, then another was that the chief merit of Sillitoe's early books lay in their documentary quality. At their heart, it was assumed, lurked a conventional social realism that was the literary equivalent of cinéma-vérité. All this is profoundly to underestimate the degree of sophistication that Sillitoe brought to his work and his determination to go beyond dramatised sociology into a world where the novelist of "ordinary life" had rarely set foot.

"The Match", for example, perhaps the finest of the stories in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, is usually read as a straightforward piece of reportage, in which an embittered middle-aged man stamps home from a football game his side have lost, takes his disappointment out on his long-suffering wife and picks a quarrel that will end his marriage. Its abiding feature, though, is less its "realism" – although there is plenty of that – than the stealthiness of its psychology, the ominous prefigurations, a well-nigh determinist sense of individual destiny hanging in the air, and at the end a rather chilling attempt to weave Lennox's fate into a wider pattern of ordinary lives ruined by bad temper and a failure to communicate. British readers admired "The Match", (mostly) assuming that it was another utensil from the late 50s kitchen sink. Sillitoe's French translators, on the other hand, marked him down as the heir to Camus.

In a memorable Desert Island Discs interview recorded a year or so ago, Sillitoe advanced the modest claim that all he had ever really wanted to do was to achieve enough success to enable him to, as he put it, "plod away", writing a book a year and pleasing himself. This is exactly what he contrived to do: the bibliography of his post-1960s output runs to more than 60 items, including poetry, a shrewd and revealing autobiography (Life Without Armour, 1995) and the recent cold war travelogue, Gadfly in Russia. The novels of his maturity are a mixed bunch, differing wildly in subject-matter and approach and often bewildering fans of his early work. To his biographer Richard Bradford this is evidence of a wholesale dereliction of critical duty, in which reviewers who had misunderstood his first books either underrated his achievement or simply failed to comprehend what he was trying to do.

Certainly a trawl through some of his later fiction tends to support this view. A Start in Life (1970) retains some of the old Nottingham background while soon developing into a picaresque (Sillitoe maintained that his mentors were the Spanish novelists Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Mateo Alemán and Francisco de Quevedo). It takes its hero, Michael Cullen, from the Midlands to a hustler's life in Soho and concludes, amid a hail of bullets, as a skit on the idea of the existential hero. The Broken Chariot (1998), is another kind of skit, in which Sillitoe cunningly inverts the trajectory of his own early career, has an upper-class boy named Thurgarton-Strang break out of his West Country boarding-school and re-invent himself as the Seatonesque "Bert Gedling", a boozy tail-chaser employed by the Nottingham Royal Ordnance factory and aspiring proletarian writer. Neither novel achieved the success it deserved.

Sillitoe was phlegmatic about this neglect, an attitude he brought to most aspects of his long and industrious career. He fitted into no niche, peddled no theories about the nature of his craft ("One either judges, or one writes, and I only care to do the latter," he tersely informed a magazine symposium in 1978), succumbed to perilously few of the blandishments on offer to the successful modern practitioner (creative writing professorships, newspaper columns), and it is difficult not to believe that, with his death, a particular strand of late 20th-century English literature has ceased to exist.

In the 50 and a bit years since Saturday Night and Sunday Morning crash-landed on the weekend books pages, there have been plenty of novelists capable of seeing working-class life from the inside, but none of them was forged in quite the same kind of crucible as Sillitoe. Above all, there is the terrific air of individuation and quiddity brought to a part of the demographic that, with a few honourable exceptions, the pre-1950s novel had routinely ignored. "We all need to remember," Hoggart once remarked, "every day and more and more, that in the last resort there is no such person as 'the common man'." The same can be said of the working-class novelist. Perhaps the greatest compliment one can pay Alan Sillitoe is to say that, in an age of movements and alliances, shared assumptions and mass thought – all the collectivist baggage that hangs around the writer's neck like so many millstones – he represented no one but himself.

--

DJ Taylor
The Guardian, Saturday 1 May 2010 Article history

The 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time, Part 1

Mark Twain, Austen Hater

One man's Shakespeare is another man's trash fiction.

Consider this pithy commentary on the Great Bard's work:


With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare....


But, of course, there must be SOME writers we can all agree on as truly great, right? Like Jane Austen. Or not:


Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.


Robert Frost?


If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes.


John Steinbeck, surely?


I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.


Oh, dear.


But don't think these pleasantries were penned in a frolicsome hour by dilettante book critics with an unslaked thirst for a bit of author-bashing.

The Shakespearean take-down was George Bernard Shaw, the Austen shin-bone basher was Mark Twain, the anti-Frost poet was James Dickey, and the quick!-bring-me-the-bucket-it's-Steinbeck was James Gould Cozzens.

Yes, hell hath no fury like one author gleefully savaging another author's work.


And, lucky for us, there's plenty to be had where that came from.

Cast your eye on these, the 50 most memorable author vs. author put-downs (in no particular order; though if you've got a favorite, by all means, comment on it, below).

Hemingway: writer of bells, balls, and bulls

1. Ernest Hemingway, according to Vladimir Nabokov (1972)

As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.


2. Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote, according to Martin Amis (1986)


Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 -- the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that 'Don Quixote' could do.

3. John Keats, according to Lord Byron (1820)

Here are Johnny Keats's p@# a-bed poetry...There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables, that I am ashamed to look at them.

4. Edgar Allan Poe, according to Henry James (1876)

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

5. John Updike, according to Gore Vidal (2008)


I can't stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I'm supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him. I'm more popular than he is, and I don't take him very seriously...oh, he comes on like the worker's son, like a modern-day D.H. Lawrence, but he's just another boring little middle-class boy hustling his way to the top if he can do it.


6. William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, according to Samuel Pepys (1662)


...we saw 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.


7. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)


Bulwer nauseates me; he is the very pimple of the age's humbug. There is no hope of the public, so long as he retains an admirer, a reader, or a publisher.

Charles Dickens writing something rotten, vulgar, and un-literary

8. Charles Dickens, according to Arnold Bennett (1898)


About a year ago, from idle curiosity, I picked up 'The Old Curiosity Shop', and of all the rotten vulgar un-literary writing...! Worse than George Eliot's. If a novelist can't write where is the beggar.


9. J.K. Rowling, according to Harold Bloom (2000)


How to read 'Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone'? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.


10. Oscar Wilde, according to Noel Coward (1946)


Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.


11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, according to Vladimir Nabokov


Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity -- all this is difficult to admire.


12. John Milton's Paradise Lost, according to Samuel Johnson


'Paradise Lost' is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.


13. Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, according to Mark Twain (1897)


Also, to be fair, there is another word of praise due to this ship's library: it contains no copy of 'The Vicar of Wakefield', that strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical cheap-john heroes and heroines, who are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting, and good people who are fatiguing.


14. Ezra Pound, according to Conrad Aiken (1918)


For in point of style, or manner, or whatever, it is difficult to imagine anything much worse than the prose of Mr. Pound. It is ugliness and awkwardness incarnate. Did he always write so badly?


15. James Joyce's Ulysses, according to George Bernard Shaw (1921)


I have read several fragments of 'Ulysses' in its serial form. It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon around Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity.


16. George Bernard Shaw, according to Roger Scruton (1990)


Concerning no subject would he be deterred by the minor accident of complete ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.

Goethe, author of the worst book Samuel Butler ever read

17. Jane Austen, according to Charlotte Bronte (1848)


Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written 'Pride and Prejudice'...than any of the Waverly novels? I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.


18. Goethe, according to Samuel Butler (1874)


I have been reading a translation of Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister.' Is it good? To me it seems perhaps the very worst book I ever read. No Englishman could have written such a book. I cannot remember a single good page or idea....Is it all a practical joke? If it really is Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister' that I have been reading, I am glad I have never taken the trouble to learn German.


19. John Steinbeck, according to James Gould Cozzens (1957)


I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. I couldn't read the proletariat crap that came out in the '30s.


20. Herman Melville, according to D.H. Lawrence (1923)


Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like 'Moby Dick'....One wearies of the grand serieux. There's something false about it. And that's Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!


21. Jonathan Swift, according to Samuel Johnson (1791)


Swift has a higher reputation than he deserves...I doubt whether 'The Tale of a Tub' to be his; for he never owned it, and it is much above his usual manner.


22. Gertrude Stein, according to Wyndham Lewis (1927)


Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.


23. Emile Zola, according to Anatole France (1911)


His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born.


24. J.D.Salinger, according to Mary McCarthy (1962)


I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can't stand it.


25. Mark Twain, according to William Faulkner (1922)


A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

Literary Journals Associated With MFA Programs

As an MFA student, helping to put out a literary magazine—whether you’re an editor, a reader, or a publicity volunteer—offers a valuable glimpse into the realm of professional publishing and another means of learning about your community of writers. If, as part of your graduate experience, you’re interested in contributing your time or writing to a school-sponsored journal, check out this listing of institutions whose MFA programs produce literary magazines.

University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Black Warrior Review

University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Permafrost 


American University, Washington, D.C.
Folio

University of Arizona, Tucson
Sonora Review 


Arizona State University, Tempe
Hayden’s Ferry Review 


Ashland University, Ohio
River Teeth

University of Baltimore
Passager Journal

Boise State University, Idaho
cold-drill
The Idaho Review

Bowling Green State University, Ohio
Mid-American Review

Brooklyn College, CUNY
The Brooklyn Review

Butler University, Indianapolis
Booth

University of California, Irvine
Faultline

University of California, Riverside,
Palm Desert Graduate Center
The Coachella Review

California College of the Arts, San Francisco
Eleven Eleven

California Institute of the Arts, Valencia
Black Clock
Sprawl

California State University, Fresno
The Normal School

California State University, Long Beach
RipRap

California State University, San Bernardino
Pacific Review

University of Central Florida, Orlando
The Cypress Dome
The Florida Review

Chapman University, Orange, California
Elephant Tree

Chatham University, Pittsburgh
The Fourth River

City College of New York, CUNY
Fiction
Global City Review
Promethean

Colorado State University, Fort Collins
Colorado Review
The Freestone

Columbia College, Chicago
F Magazine
Hair Trigger

Columbia University, New York City
Columbia

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
EPOCH

Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond
Aurora
Jelly Bucket

Eastern Washington University, Spokane
Willow Springs

Emerson College, Boston
Ploughshares
Redivider

Fairfield University, Connecticut
Dogwood

Fairleigh Dickinson University,
Madison, New Jersey
The Literary Review

University of Florida, Gainesville
Subtropics

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Coastlines

Florida International University, Miami
Gulf Stream Magazine

Florida State University, Tallahassee
The Kudzu Review
The Southeast Review

George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
Phoebe

So to Speak

Georgia College & State University,
Milledgeville
Arts & Letters
Flannery O’Connor Review

Georgia State University, Atlanta
Five Points
New South

Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont,
and Port Townsend, Washington
Pitkin Review

Hamline University
Water-Stone Review

Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia
The Hollins Critic

University of Houston, Texas
Gulf Coast

Hunter College, CUNY
The Olivetree Review

University of Idaho, Moscow
Fugue

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ninth Letter

Indiana University, Bloomington
Indiana Review

University of Iowa, Iowa City
The Iowa Review

Iowa State University, Ames
Flyway

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
and Washington, D.C.
The Hopkins Review

University of Kansas, Lawrence
Cottonwood

Lindenwood University, St. Charles, Missouri
Untamed Ink

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
Exquisite Corpse

New Delta Review
The Southern Review

Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York
Inkwell

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
CRATE

jubilat
The Massachusetts Review

University of Massachusetts, Boston
Breakwater Review

University of Memphis
The Pinch

Mills College, Oakland
580 Split

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Dislocate

Minnesota State University, Mankato
Blue Earth Review

Minnesota State University, Moorhead
Red Weather

University of Mississippi, Oxford
The Yalobusha Review

University of Missouri, Columbia
Center
The Missouri Review

University of Missouri, Kansas City
New Letters

University of Missouri, Saint Louis
Natural Bridge

University of Montana, Missoula
CutBank

Murray State University, Kentucky
New Madrid

Naropa University, Jack Kerouac School
of Disembodied Poetics, Boulder, Colorado
Bombay Gin
not enough night

University of Nebraska, Lincoln (PhD)
Prairie Schooner

University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Interim

University of New Hampshire, Durham
Barnstorm

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Blue Mesa Review

New Mexico State University, Las Cruces
Puerto del Sol

University of New Orleans
Bayou

The New School University, New York City
LIT

New York University, New York City
Washington Square Review

University of North Carolina, Greensboro
The Greensboro Review
storySouth

University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Ecotone

North Carolina State University, Raleigh
Free Verse

Northeast Ohio Universities Consortium (NEOMFA)
Luna Negra
Penguin Review
Rubbertop Review
Whiskey Island Magazine

Northern Michigan University, Marquette
Passages North

University of North Texas, Denton
American Literary Review
North Texas Review

University of Notre Dame, Indiana
The Bend
Notre Dame Review
Re:Visions

Ohio State University, Columbus
The Journal

University of Oregon, Eugene
Northwest Review

Oregon State University, Corvallis
Prism

Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles
OR

Pacific Lutheran University’s
Rainier Writing Workshop, Tacoma
A River & Sound Review

Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon
Silk Road

University of Pittsburgh
Collision

Hot Metal Bridge
No 


Portland State University, Oregon
Oregon Literary Review
Pathos Lit Mag
The Portland Review

Purdue University, West Lafayette, Louisiana
Sycamore Review

Queens College, CUNY
Ozone Park

Roosevelt University, Chicago
Oyez Review

Rosemont College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
Parlor 


Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey
StoryQuarterly

Saint Mary’s College of California, Moraga
Mary

San Diego State University
Fiction International
Poetry International

University of San Francisco
Switchback

San Francisco State University
Fourteen Hills
Transfer

San Jose State University, California
Reed Magazine

Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York
Lumina

Seattle Pacific University

Image

University of South Carolina
Yemassee

Southern Connecticut State University,
New Haven
Connecticut Review
Noctua Review

Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Crab Orchard Review

University of Southern Maine, Portland
Words and Images

Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester
Amoskeag

University of South Florida, Tampa
Saw Palm

Spalding University, Louisville
The Louisville Review

Stony Brook Southampton, SUNY
The Southampton Review

Syracuse University, New York
Salt Hill

University of Texas, El Paso
Rio Grande Review

University of Texas, James A. Michener
Center for Writers, Austin
Bat City Review

University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg
gallery

Texas State University, San Marcos
Front Porch

University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Quarterly West
Western Humanities Review

Vanderbilt University, Nashville
The Vanderbilt Review

Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier
Hunger Mountain

University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Meridian

Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Blackbird

Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University, Blacksburg
The New River

Western Connecticut State University, Danbury
Black & White
Connecticut Review
Sentence

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
Third Coast

University of Washington, Seattle
The Seattle Review

West Virginia University, Morgantown
The Loop

Whidbey Writers Workshop, Freeland, Washington
Soundings Review

Wichita State University, Kansas
Mikrokosmos

University of Wisconsin, Madison
The Madison Review

2010 Creative Writing MFA Rankings: The Top Fifty

If this link ever stops working, below is a list of the top 50 MFA programs for Creative Writing in the US (Seth Abramson's list as published in Poets & Writers magazine).

Rank	School	Votes (of 508)	Poetry Rank	Fiction Rank	Nonfiction Rank	Total Funding Rank	Annual Funding Rank
1	University of Iowa in Iowa City	253	1	1	1	21	22
2	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	169	3	2	*	16	4
3	University of Virginia, Charlottesville	144	2	4	*	21	21
4	University of Massachusetts, Amherst	132	4	5	*	40	41
4	University of Texas, Austin	132	5	6	*	1	1
6	University of Wisconsin, Madison	129	6	11	*	21	22
7	Brown University in Providence	127	8	3	*	19	20
8	New York University in New York City	125	7	7	*	+	+
9	Cornell University in Ithaca, New York	110	9	7	*	10	2
10	University of Oregon, Eugene	104	15	12	*	27	29
11	Syracuse University in New York	97	20	10	*	5	7
12	Indiana University, Bloomington	93	13	14	*	6	8
13	University of California, Irvine	91	26	9	*	26	28
14	University of Minnesota, Minneapolis	85	17	14	8	29	27
15	Brooklyn College, CUNY	81	39	13	*	*	*
16	University of Montana, Missoula	78	17	17	17	47	46
17	Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore	77	11	16	*	30	30
18	Vanderbilt University in Nashville	76	13	18	23	25	26
19	University of North Carolina, Greensboro	75	10	19	*	33	31
20	Washington University, St. Louis	70	15	24	*	12	3
21	University of Florida, Gainesville	67	22	21	*	13	16
22	Columbia University in New York City	66	38	19	10	*	*
23	University of Notre Dame in Indiana	62	34	22	12	+	+
24	Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia	56	32	26	4	+	+
24	University of North Carolina, Wilmington	56	22	25	5	41	42
26	Arizona State University, Tempe	55	19	28	35	15	18
26	Hunter College, CUNY	55	45	22	6	*	*
26	University of Houston in Texas	55	11	34	18	34	34
29	Colorado State University, Fort Collins	53	20	34	*	42	43
29	The New School in New York City	53	47	27	3	*	*
31	Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York	52	27	33	8	*	*
31	University of Washington, Seattle	52	27	28	*	*	*
33	University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa	51	25	31	29	2	18
34	University of Arizona, Tucson	49	32	28	2	+	+
35	Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana	45	22	40	*	9	10
36	University of Arkansas, Fayetteville	41	31	45	*	17	24
37	George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia	40	39	34	12	+	+
38	Boston University in Massachusetts	39	39	38	*	+	+
39	University of Nevada, Las Vegas	38	48	31	*	35	35
40	Ohio State University, Columbus	35	27	+	35	7	9
41	University of Maryland, College Park	34	37	44	*	*	*
42	Florida State University, Tallahassee	33	39	+	*	38	38
42	Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge	33	*	46	*	3	5
42	Rutgers University, Newark in New Jersey	33	*	37	12	*	*
42	University of New Hampshire, Durham	33	39	40	7	*	*
46	Pennsylvania State University, University Park	32	45	46	11	28	14
47	Southern Illinois University, Carbondale	31	27	48	*	14	17
47	Texas State University, San Marcos	31	*	40	*	+	+
49	University of Mississippi, Oxford	31	+	40	*	18	25
50	University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign	30	34	+	*	4	6
50	Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond	30	+	38	*	31	32
50	Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg	30	34	+	*	8	10

Note: An honorable mention goes to Bowling Green State University, a two-year program in Ohio that ranks among the top fifty programs in selectivity (#47), total funding (#46), annual funding (#45), and poetry (#48), and received pluses in overall votes and fiction. For a ranking of the additional eighty-eight full-residency MFA programs, click here.