"Mark Twain’s insults could make a list in themselves, but he was particularly unfond of author Jane Austen. Twain claimed in a letter to a friend that he could read James Fennimore Cooper (another writer he famously loathed) "on salary," but not Austen. In another letter he said reading Pride and Prejudice made him wish he could "dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
(via The Top Ten Best Put-Downs in Literary History)
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A novelist friend of mine once said, in very dry manner, that reading Dickens was like having a perverse teacher force toothpicks under your eyelids so that no matter how much you wanted to drowse you were still forced to read it!
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1 comments:
I am not a fan of Cooper (having read Twain's essay before I read what he was talking about), but I love Austen and Dickens. And Twain has been a favorite since I was nine years old. Huck Finn is a brand new book every time I return to it.
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