Huffington Post Books published an article titled "Bad
Reviews Of Great Authors." When you
get a bad review of your work, it’s comforting to know that supposed experts hated
these classics.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
"There
is not in the entire dramatis persona, a single character which is not utterly
hateful or thoroughly contemptible." Atlas, 1848
The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
"Mr.
Updike’s descriptions of these magical doings are cringe-making in the extreme,
not funny or satiric as he perhaps intends." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
"...
the book is sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous. Mr. Melville's Quakers
are the wretchedest dolts and drivellers, and his Mad Captain ... is a
monstrous bore." Charleston
Southern Quarterly Review, 1852
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"no
more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that... Only Gatsby
himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes—often astonishingly
lifelike, but nevertheless not quite alive." H.L. Mencken, Baltimore
Evening Sun, 1925
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
"Unfortunately,
it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any
adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a
pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is
repulsive." Orville
Prescott, The New York Times, 1958
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
"... it
is impossible to imagine how any man's fancy could have conceived such a mass
of stupid filth, unless he were possessed of the soul of a sentimental donkey
that had died of disappointed love." Rufus
Wilmot Griswold, The Criterion, 1855
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
“What other
culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?” Gore Vidal