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Literary hack   /lˈɪtərˌɛri hæk/   Listen
Literary hack

noun
1.
A mediocre and disdained writer.  Synonyms: hack, hack writer.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Literary hack" Quotes from Famous Books



... the success of the chapbook that encouraged the editors of periodicals early in the nineteenth century to enliven their pages with sensational fiction. The literary hack, who, if he had lived a century earlier, would have been glad to turn a Turkish tale for half-a-crown, now cheerfully furnished a "fireside horror" for the Christmas number. In his search after novelty he was often driven to wild and desperate expedients. Leigh Hunt, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... 'Guthrie:' William Guthrie, a literary hack. See Boswell. He wrote an absurd History of ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... physical distress caused by lifelong dyspepsia and insomnia. For some years and in various places he taught school and received private pupils, for very meager wages, latterly in Edinburgh, where he also did literary hack-work. He had planned at first to be a minister, but the unorthodoxy of his opinions rendered this impossible; and he also studied law only to abandon it. One of the most important forces in this period of his slow preparation was his study of German and his absorption ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... of age in 1832, he inherited a small fortune, which he soon lost in an Indian bank and in newspaper investments. He was then forced to overcome his idle, procrastinating habits. He became a literary hack, and contributed humorous articles to such magazines as Fraser and Punch. While his pen was causing mirth and laughter in England, his heart was torn by suffering. His wife, whom he had married in 1837, became insane. He nursed her patiently with the vain hope that she could recover; ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... the English balladist is an unwarlike literary hack. The author of the Ettrick version knew better the nature of war, as we shall see, and his Douglas objects to Otterburn as a place destitute of supplies; nothing is there but wild beasts and birds. If the original poem is the sensible poem, the Scott ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang



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