There’s an adage they give you when you receive your name badge at the door of Writer Land: “You only compete with yourself.” While most authors hold true to this (at least in public), there are those who make time to spend bashing their fellow wordslingers. Here are ten cringe-worthy examples.

1. Mark Twain vs. Ambrose Bierce
When they asked Samuel Clemens to read and review long-time friend Ambrose Bierce’s not-so-bestseller, Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California by Dod Grile, publishers Chatto & Windus had no idea they’d get such a scathing report back. Twain calls Nuggets and Dust “the vilest book that exists in print” and ends with what might be the most simultaneously hilarious and hurtful review of all time:

“There is humor in Dod Grile, but for every laugh that is in his book there are five blushes, ten shudders and a vomit. The laugh is too expensive.”

2. James Frey vs. Dave Eggers
Before his tearful apology on Oprah for passing off as a memoir his best-selling tale of addiction and redemption, and even before the book had been released, James Frey took aim at Dave Eggers and his much-hailed A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Here’s what Frey said in an interview in New York Observer:

“The Eggers book pissed me off. Because a book that I thought was mediocre was being hailed as the best book written by the best writer of my generation. F**k that. And f**k him and f**k anybody who says that.”

3. Ernest Hemingway vs. Ford Madox Ford.
In a letter sent to Ezra Pound in 1925, Papa Hemingway compares contemporary Ford Madox Ford to a bull in a less-than-complimentary tirade:

“Bulls at least are not the greatest stylists in English – no bull has ever been a political exile. Bulls don’t run reviews. Bulls of 25 don’t marry old women of 55 and expect to be invited to dinner… Bulls do not borrow money… Bulls are edible after they have been killed.”