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Some of Abbey's most entertaining letters involve skirmishes over literary reputation, one of his enduring obsessions. In a letter to the Nation, he contrasted Kurt Vonnegut's "concern for justice, love, honesty and hope" with "novels about the ethnic introspection project (Roth, Bellow)" and "the miseries of suburban hanky-panky (Updike, Cheever, Irving)."
He disparaged Jack Kerouac as "that creepy adolescent bisexual who dabbled in Orientalism and all the other fads of his time, wrote stacks of complacently self-indulgent, onanastic [sic] books and then drank himself to death while sitting on his mother's lap, down in Florida." He called Tom Wolfe a "faggoty fascist little fop" but later defended "Bonfire of the Vanities" as a "novel that reminds us, in the end, that defiance and resistance, manhood and honor, are still possible."
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