The photographers were waiting like assassins outside the door on the cold slate street. John O’Hara, the millionaire hermit novelist, sort of staggered down the churchsteps in front of me; his legs buckled as he reached the final step. He looked smaller than I would have thought from gossip about him as a barroom brawler 30 years ago. His Rolls Royce was waiting for him in front of the church. He was wearing a natty doublebreasted grey-check suit, ears sticking out like Gable and Mailer, eyes on the steps, speaking to no one… . Alert, but a stone misanthrope—that was the message.
—Seymour Krim, writing about John Steinbeck’s funeral service (1969)

American he-men writers used to pride themselves on their ability to punch their way out of a paper bag. For these bare-knuckled typists, writin’ was fightin’, to paraphrase Ishmael Reed, and some didn’t hesitate to reply to a bad review or a snide comment with a right uppercut. Ernest Hemingway fancied himself a heavyweight champ inside the ring and out (“I beat Mr. Turgenev,” he boasted infamously to Lillian Ross, “Then I trained very hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant”), scuffling with the critic Max Eastman after Eastman had mocked him for being a fur-bearing author. Norman Mailer, Hemingway’s curly-locked heir, hoisted on the boxing trunks to show his mettle, bobbing and weaving with Jose Torres on “The Dick Cavett Show.” Perhaps no literary pugilist in the amateur division wielded his fists