8 Times Authors Took Revenge in Their Fiction

Countless authors have used bitter rivalries and petty squabbles as inspiration for their greatest works. Whether it was through biting satire or thinly veiled fictional portrayals, some famed writers managed to sublimate their personal vendettas into beloved works of literature—which will humiliate their adversaries for as long as their books are read. Here are just a few of them.

1. Dante Alighieri // The Divine Comedy 
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald // Tender Is The Night
3. Truman Capote //  “La Côte Basque, 1965” and Answered Prayers
4. Alexander Pope // “The Dunciad” 
5. Philip Roth // I Married a Communist 
6. Aristophanes // The Clouds
7. Ernest Hemingway // The Sun Also Rises
8. James Joyce // Ulysses 

Dante Alighieri // The Divine Comedy 

Despite being one of the most influential figures in Western literature, Dante Alighieri was not above holding steadfast to petty gripes. The Italian poet used his magnum opus The Divine Comedy to take shots at adversaries like Filippo Argenti and Pope Boniface VIII. 

Argenti was a prominent member of the Black Guelphs political faction that had exiled Dante from Florence in 1302. Dante depicts him in The Divine Comedy as a wrathful spirit condemned to eternal torture in the Greek underworld’s River Styx. Dante waxes poetic about the sadistic glee he’s taken in Argenti’s damnation while depicting his grisly fate in lurid detail.

Later in the story, Dante encounters Pope Nicholas III in the eighth Circle of Hell, where he’s buried headfirst in stones with flames licking at his feet. Nicholas III mistakes Dante for Pope Boniface VIII, Nicholas III’s successor, who was associated with the Black Guelphs. In this scene, Dante is implying that Boniface had already been condemned to hell for supporting the faction that had exiled him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald // Tender Is The Night

In his fourth and final novel Tender Is the Night, published in 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald leaves his readers with a thinly veiled, self-pitying portrait of his turbulent marriage to writer Zelda Fitzgerald. Tender Is The Night takes place on the French Riviera and chronicles the deterioration of the relationship between Dick, an alcoholic psychiatrist, and Nicole, Dick’s wife and one of his former patients. Like Nicole, Zelda came from a wealthy family and struggled with mental illness throughout her life, while Fizgerald, like Dick, frequently battled alcoholism and self-flagellating career frustrations.

In a copy of the book that Fitzgerald had given to Zelda’s psychiatrist (which later sold at auction for $175,000), the author admitted to basing the novel on his marriage, telling the physician that he’d modeled all of Nicole’s erratic behavior off his wife’s own. 

While Tender Is The Night never quite reached the level of acclaim of his other works like The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald considered it his best, and it underwent a critical renaissance in tandem with the posthumous re-evaluation of Zelda’s own work. 

Truman Capote //  “La Côte Basque, 1965” and Answered Prayers

Truman Capote never shied away from controversy throughout his illustrious, decades-spanning career. Quite the contrary, in fact: Capote was notorious for courting it, culminating in the publication of his posthumous novel Answered Prayers in 1986. He pitched the novel to publishers in the late 1950s, but he wouldn’t sign a contract for it until 1966, and continually missed deadlines for the novel’s completion right up to his death in 1984.

In the meantime, Esquire published Capote’s notorious short story “La Côte Basque, 1965” in November 1975, which skewered his famous high society friends and aired their dirtiest laundry. Nearly all of the people he lampooned abandoned him. Yet he still envisioned the story as a chapter in his ever-forthcoming novel, for which he had received a sizable advance from Penguin Random House, though his now-enemies predicted it would obliterate whatever goodwill society still had for him.

Capote promoted Answered Prayers as a juicy roman à clef, but only four completed chapters of the intended seven were ever discovered, coming in at less than 200 pages of work. Theories abound regarding the novel’s ultimate fate, with some even speculating Capote had completed the rest of the novel, salacious details and all, and destroyed it himself before his death. 

Alexander Pope // “The Dunciad” 

In his scorched-earth satirical poem “The Dunciad,” English poet Alexander Pope took the opportunity to excoriate numerous fellow writers he felt had wronged him. Chief among those was Lewis Theobald, a Shakespearean scholar who had criticized Pope’s work on the Bard. Pope exacted revenge by depicting him as the King of Dunces in the poem’s 1728 edition.

In later editions of The Dunciad, Pope replaced Theobald as King of Dunces with Colley Cibber, an opportunistic British playwright and poet laureate who had also publicly criticized Pope. Pope mocked Cibber’s vanity, social climbing, and pomposity in verse, while Cibber responded with a series of pamphlets and letters defending himself and poking fun at Pope’s small stature and chronic ailments. Cibber’s untoward business practices and general unpopularity among his contemporaries allowed Pop to redefine the once-lauded poet’s artistic legacy. 

You May Also Like:

• The Incredible Eccentricities of 20 Great Writers
• 11 Authors Who Hated the Movie Versions of Their Books
• 10 Famous Authors and Their Unfinished Manuscripts

Add Mental Floss as a preferred news source!

Philip Roth // I Married a Communist 

Following the release of his ex-wife Claire Bloom’s incendiary memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, in 1996, Philip Roth was eager to depict Bloom in an equally unflattering light. 

Bloom, an accomplished English stage and screen actress, spent 15 years with Roth before the pair wed in 1990. The couple’s marriage began to fall apart just two years in; Roth had a knee operation that purportedly resulted in an addiction to pills, and their relationship ended in a vindictive, acrimonious divorce in 1995. 

Leaving a Doll’s House had characterized Roth as immensely cruel, mercurial, and withdrawn. Roth answered the charges with his semi-autobiographical novel I Married a Communist two years later and depicted Bloom as shallow, opportunistic, and promiscuous in the character of its protagonist, Eve Frame. 

I Married a Communist was ostensibly concerned with the rise of McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the mid-20th century, though it became clear to readers early on that the novel was a retaliation to Bloom’s memoir. After the novel’s publication, Bloom doubled down on her claims, describing Roth as insecure and misogynistic.  

Aristophanes // The Clouds

Often referred to as the “the father of comedy,” Greek playwright Aristophanes frequently used his work to mock or parody contemporary events and figures. The Clouds was no exception, and it was not the playwright’s first brush with controversy: Some years earlier, he was taken to court by Cleon, a Greek politician, over his now-lost play The Babylonians that parodied the recent Greek war in Peloponnesia. (Aristophanes hit back at Cleon by lampooning him in his next production, The Knights.)

The Clouds was a break from Aristophanes’s previous work, which had primarily focused on Athenian military and political conflicts, and emerged as his most philosophical work to date by parodying the ongoing “battle” of ideas among the Greek intelligentsia. Though the play received less adulation than his previous work, Aristophanes’s unflattering portrayal of the philosopher Socrates caused quite a stir. Socrates had been a frequent figure of mockery around the time The Clouds was produced.

The accusations levied against Socrates in The Clouds were relatively tame, yet Plato cited caricatures of the philosopher, like those in Aristophanes’s work, as contributing to Socrates’s trial and execution more than 20 years later.

Ernest Hemingway // The Sun Also Rises

With his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway presented a controversial roman à clef following his adventurous, booze-soaked life in France and Spain in the early 1920s. Throughout the novel, Jake Barnes (a journalist and obvious stand-in for the author) competes with a gaggle of other men for the attention of Lady Brett Ashley, a glamorous English divorcée based on Lady Duff Twysden, a thoroughly liberated baroness with whom Hemingway had been infatuated. 

The novel was intended to be primarily about bullfighting, but Lady Duff’s appearance in Hemingway’s social circle eventually took center stage in the novel. While Lady Brett was often depicted as charming, beautiful, and worldly, she was described with equal insistence as manipulative, promiscuous, and greedy. Lady Duff and Hemingway never embarked on a physical affair (Hemingway was still married to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, at the time of their meeting), but she had a disruptive effect on him, creatively and personally. 

Lady Duff reportedly viewed the novel’s depiction of her with disdain, though she left behind few letters, diaries, or writings, making her own legacy almost indistinguishable from that of her literary counterpart. 

James Joyce // Ulysses 

James Joyce got back at his former friend, fellow writer Oliver St. John Gogarty, through an unflattering depiction of Gogarty in the character Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Mulligan, a self-serving medical student, rooms with the novel’s protagonist, Stephen Dedalus (a stand-in for Joyce himself). Gogarty was a well-connected figure in Dublin’s burgeoning literary scene and had introduced Joyce to myriad Irish writers, poets, and intellectuals before their friendship soured in 1904. 

After inviting Gogarty to stay with him in Sandycove, at what is now the James Joyce Tower and Museum, the literary duo’s relationship turned hostile when Gogarty began drunkenly mocking Joyce and discharging firearms inside the house. Joyce left Sandycove within the week and the pair’s friendship never recovered. Though Gogarty claimed Joyce’s depiction of him was extremely caricatured, Joyce did use a litany of real-life details about Gogarty in his characterization, such as his medical studies, charismatic wit, and mocking attitude toward Joyce. 

In Ulysses, Joyce’s portrayal of his former friend was instantly recognizable to readers, infuriating Gogarty but delighting the Irish literary community.