George Eliot was so wounded by bad reviews that her lover and companion George Henry Lewes used to go through the papers and magazines to make sure she never saw one. And Brendan Gill tells a story about the American writer John O’Hara, who, among his many accomplishments, wrote the book for the Broadway musical Pal Joey: when some friends passed him on the streets of New York and told him that they had just seen Pal Joey again and had enjoyed it even more than they had the first time, O’Hara snapped, “What was wrong with it the first time?”
