Tag: David Comfort

“I have grown determined to prove that the art of literature is more resilient than what menaces it. The best defense of literary freedoms lies in their exercise, in continuing to make untrammeled, uncowed books.” Joseph Anton, aka Salman Rushdie By 1989, Norman Mailer was championing an ex-ad man who ... Read More

  “It was almost as if each [Mailer] book was a round in a fight.” E.L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer’s editor   "What you have with a fight is what you have with writing: … the ring, the page; the punch, the word… the sweat, the edit… the bell, the deadline….the ... Read More

  “My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything.” Ernest Hemingway   “The minute he began to have some sort of obligation to you of love or friendship… then is when he had to kill you.” Donald Ogden Stewart, Hemingway friend   In The Torrents of Spring, Hemingway dismissed his contemporaries ... Read More

   "I think of the three of them now as Larry, Curly & Moe.” Tom Wolfe, of John (Updike), John (Irving) & Norman (Mailer)   A century and a half after the Poe/English bout, three pedigreed but aging novelists shanked a colleague shorter than the Baltimore bete noire, but with ... Read More

  “Poe’s jealousy of other writers amounted to a mania.” Frederick Saunders, biographer of Edgar Allan Poe   Dueling preceding boxing, headbutting, and backstabbing as the gentleman’s way of resolving literary and extra-literary disputes. After publishing Pleasures and Days, Marcel Proust challenged critic Jean Lorrain to a duel for a review ... Read More

“I don’t think writers are comfortable in each other’s presence. We can talk, of course, for five minutes or so, but I don’t think we want to socialize.” Joseph Heller                       The last half of the 19th century was enlivened ... Read More

“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.” W. Somerset Maugham While writers have long battled publishers, editors, and critics, many have fought even more fiercely with the competition – themselves. If editorial rejection is maddening, peer criticism can be even more infuriating. This is particularly true in ... Read More