Literary Rivals

Novelists, poets and playwrights live double lives, sharing the real world with everyone else while spending a good deal of time in a universe of their own making. When they fall out with each other they seem able to kindle feuds as passionate and as public as workers in any trade. Richard Bradford's highly entertaining book looks at some of the closest and most complex friendships in literary history and examines the dramatic effects on relationships and on literature itself. Figures covered here include Nabokov, whose novel Lolita originated from a festering argument with his erstwhile friend the esteemed critic Edmund Wilson. Also included are Alan Sillitoe, who reserved a particular contempt for anyone who expected him to conform, Evelyn Waugh, whose loathing for the rest of humanity seemed limitless, and Salman Rushdie, whose writings earned him a death sentence. John Milton conducted a battle in words against a continent almost united in its condemnation of regicide while a lesser-known hero, J. C. Squire, defended common sense against the might of Modernism. A single sentence uttered in the Garrick Club ended an already tentative friendship between Dickens and Thackeray. An enjoyable romp through the world of the fiercest writers' rivalries and most bizarre literary stand-offs.