Mickey Spillane? Terry Southern? David Halberstam? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: The best-selling author of pulp thrillers was excoriated by literary critics. His reported response was harsh:
The literary world is made of second-rate writers writing about other second-rate writers.
This statement has been credited to Mickey Spillane, but I am skeptical because I have never seen a citation. Is this quotation genuine? Would you please help me to find a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: U.S. crime novelist Mickey Spillane created the detective character Mike Hammer. Spillane wrote “I, the Jury” (1947), “My Gun Is Quick” (1950), “Kiss Me Deadly” (1952), and other bestsellers. In 1963 “Esquire” magazine published an interview with Spillane conducted by Terry Southern who mentioned that he was preparing a magazine issue covering the U.S. literary scene. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
After a terrific guffaw, and a slow, rather deliberate and somehow menacing cracking of knuckles, the Mick said, “Yeah, I’ve seen those articles—they never mention me; all they talk about are the Losers.”
“The Losers?”
“The guys who didn’t make it—the guys nobody ever heard of.”
“Why would they talk about them?”
“Because they can be condescending about the Losers. You know, they can afford to say something nice about them. You see, these articles are usually written by Losers—frustrated writers. And these writers resent success. So naturally they never have anything good to say about the Winners.”
Spillane’s answers above did not precisely match the quotation under examination; however, his remarks did exhibit a conceptual match. The term “losers” corresponded to “second-rate writers”. See the 1993 citation further below to learn more about the true creator of the quotation.
The 1963 interview contained other sharp replies from Spillane:2
“How do you feel about literary criticism of your books?”
“The public is the only critic. And the only literature is what the public reads. The first printing of my last book was more than two million copies—that’s the kind of opinion that interests me.”
When Spillane was asked about a fellow writer he was unsparing:
“Thomas Wolfe was a lousy writer,” he said. “He didn’t know what he was doing.”
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In 1993 journalist and historian David Halberstam published a book about the U.S. in the 1950s titled “The Fifties”. Halberstam wrote the following about Spillane:3
Certainly, the critics hated him. James Sandoe of the Herald Tribune called him “an inept vulgarian.” . . . Such critical salvos did not burden Spillane, who liked to say that he did not care about the critics and that the only critics who mattered were his readers.
He thought the literary world was made up of second-rate writers who wrote about other second-rate writers. It was a world of the Losers. “The Losers?” Terry Southern asked him. “The guys who didn’t make it,” he answered, “the guys nobody ever heard of.”
The passage above included a version of the quotation. However, the statement was not placed between quotations marks. Instead, the statement was Halberstam’s perception of the viewpoint help by Spillane. Thus, Halberstam was the author of the quotation.
In 2019 the website “AceReader Blogger” published an article about Spillane containing the quotation:4
Malcolm Crowley of The New Republic called him “a dangerous paranoid, sadist, and masochist,” and even his own editors sometimes couldn’t stomach his content. Spillane was unmoved by his detractors, saying “You can sell a lot more peanuts than caviar,” and “The literary world is made of second rate writers writing about other second rate writers.”
In May 2024 the Wikipedia article for Mickey Spillane included the quotation:5
Spillane for his part was unmoved by critics, saying “You can sell a lot more peanuts than caviar” and “The literary world is made of second rate writers writing about other second rate writers.”
In conclusion, the quotation was not crafted by Mickey Spillane; instead, the quotation was constructed by David Halberstam in 1993. Halberstam was attempting to condense the viewpoint expressed by Spillane in the “Esquire” interview. The phrasing was Halberstam’s.
Image Notes: Illustration of a typewriter from the 1919 public domain book “The New Knowledge Library: Science, Invention, Discovery, Progress” published by The S. A. Mullikin Company.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to the anonymous person who saw the quotation in the Mickey Spillane Wikipedia article and asked QI to explore this topic.
- 1963 July, Esquire, Mickey Spillane As Mike Hammer by Terry Southern, Start Page 74, Quote Page 76, Column 1, Esquire Inc., Chicago, Illinois. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1963 July, Esquire, Mickey Spillane As Mike Hammer by Terry Southern, Start Page 74, Quote Page 76, Column 2, Esquire Inc., Chicago, Illinois. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1993, The Fifties by David Halberstam, Chapter 3, Quote Page 61, Villard Books, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- Website: AceReader Blogger, Article title: Authors, Developing Words – Mickey Spillane, Date on website: July 23, 2019, Website description: Written by a team of bloggers. (Accessed blog.acereader.com on May 9, 2024) link ↩︎
- Website: Wikipedia, Article title: Mickey Spillane, Date on website: May 9, 2024, Website description: Crowd-sourced encyclopedia. (Accessed en.wikipedia.org on May 9, 2024) link ↩︎