Literary Feuds
In a 1947 visit to a University of Mississippi creative writing class, Faulkner was asked to rank himself alongside other contemporary writers. His response, as transcribed at the time (but only published three years later, in The Western Review): 1. Thomas Wolfe: he had much courage and wrote as if he didn’t have long to live 2. William Faulkner 3. Dos Passos 4. Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. 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 5. John Steinbeck: at one time I had great hopes for him—now I don’t know. According to A.E. Hotchner in his Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, when Hemingway was told about Faulkner’s statement, he responded: 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. Did you read his last book? It’s all sauce-writing now, but he was good once. Before the sauce, or when he knew how to handle it. ~ Emily Temple
