Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer (b. 1923–d. 2007) was one of the most prolific American writers of the 20th century. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, Mailer attended Harvard University with the initial intent of becoming an aeronautical engineer. However, his writing classes at Harvard took him in a different direction and while he earned a degree in engineering, his career plans had shifted by the time of his graduation in 1943. Mailer was drafted into the army in 1944, and his experiences stationed in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry became the foundation for his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948). This novel, published to critical acclaim and commercial success, made Mailer a literary celebrity at a very young age, and he grappled with the ramifications of this early success for much of his life. Over the course of his ensuing career, which spanned nearly six decades, Mailer went on to publish over forty books, his works traversing a variety of genres across fiction and nonfiction. He was also a founder of the Village Voice in 1955, and his involvement in that publication ignited his career as a journalist and cultural critic. The 1960s and 1970s are often considered the height of Mailer’s creative output and renown: during this time, Mailer published three novels, a book of poetry, a play, a collection of short stories, and ten nonfiction books, and he also directed three experimental films. He regularly contributed to Esquire magazine, where he published “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” a prime example of the emerging style of New Journalism. He participated in the march on the Pentagon in 1967, covering the experience in The Armies of the Night (1968), which was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize again for The Executioner’s Song, his 1979 nonfiction novel about convicted killer and death row inmate Gary Gilmore. During these decades, Mailer also cemented his reputation as a public intellectual, not without controversy, speaking out publicly against the Vietnam War, running for mayor of New York in 1969, engaging in televised debates with his peers, covering political campaigns, and more. Mailer focused more pointedly on the novel and literary biography from the 1980s onward, but he continued to offer incisive cultural commentary. He wrote until his death, and his last novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007), was a New York Times bestseller.

Endgames

This chapter traces Rahv’s disintegrating relationship with Partisan Review and explains why he could no longer play the leadership role of “secular rabbi.” It considers the magazine’s alleged ties with the CIA. It discusses changes in Rahv’s personal life: moving to Boston, joining the faculty at Brandeis, remarrying, founding a new magazine, Modern Occasions. It relates Rahv’s story to that of Hanneh Arendt, whose publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem provoked a bitter split within Partisan Review. Arendt’s and Rahv’s attitudes toward Jewishness and Israel are discussed. It considers his animus toward Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer and enthusiasm for the New Left, which provoked a public rift with longtime associate Irving Howe. It delves into the mysterious circumstances surrounding Rahv’s death and bequest to Israel. I relate my own attitudes during the sixties to Rahv’s, notably regarding new intellectual movements and feminism.

Norman Mailer and the experience of celebrity

This article is a brief investigation into Norman Mailer’s experience as a celebrity figure in American letters, and how he struggled to deal with its effects. Mailer rose to fame quite early in his literary career. Subsequent failures with publishers made him adapt the strategies of the market place to promote himself, and thus he wrote his unusual autobiography, titled Advertisements for Myself. This book brought him back among the literary stars of the day, a position that he envisaged as a precondition for the fulfillment of his dream to create a revolution in the consciousness of his time. Such a revolution would be necessary in our times, too, yet nowadays, there are even more means to become famous than in the 20th century, and fame is even shorter-lived, to be able to act on the consciousness of a large public.

Jewish Wheaties

Roth travels with Barbara Sproul to Asia, while maintaining his opposition to the Vietnam War; his writing turns to satire in a general effort to undermine seriousness in politics and literature Baseball, long a love of Roth’s, emerges in his lengthy burlesque novel, The Great American Novel followed by his semi-autobiographical My Life as a Man (1974), a rebuke to his first wife, Maggie. In the midst of his writing, a bitter legal encounter with Norman Mailer involving the young writer Alan Lelchuk occurs, at the same time he develops a friendship with the important Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, who admired Roth’s rewrite of Kafka, The Breast. But he also experiences sustained criticism from Irving Howe which he never forgot. Roth unexpectedly changes publishers leaving Random House for Holt with a new editor and soon-to-be friend, Aaron Asher.

The Concept of Power in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead: A Study in Psychological and Sociopolitical Perspectives

As one of the literary figures in post-war American literature, Norman Mailer tackles psychological and sociopolitical issues in The Naked and the Dead (1948) that bewildered both critics and readers. He combined them in a complementary way that explained their cause and effect development. The present paper sheds light on the definition of power in comparison with megalomania, its different causes, and its devastating effects on both the victimizers and the victimized. It also aims at revealing the inner thought of the contemporary individual as suffering from the spiritual decadence as a rebellion against the political life that hovers almost every aspect of the American society. These points are rendered through Mailer's major and powerful characters like General Cummings and Lieutenant Croft who represent the victimizers as a part of their megalomaniac attitudes. An emphasis has always been directed to two other powerless characters—Lieutenant Hearn and Troop Red Valsen—whom will be victimized at the hands of the victimizers. Mailer, in this novel, calls that the individual is either supposed to surrender to wrongful forces or to endeavor to attain some spiritual independence and dignity.

Norman Mailer and American Totalitarianism in the 1960s

This article investigates Norman Mailer's appropriation and Americanization of the concept of totalitarianism as an internal critique of US society and culture in the 1960s. Dominant understandings of totalitarianism from the 1930s to the 1950s focused on external threats and were wedded to notions of pervasive state control of all aspects of life. Mailer's crucial intervention offered an alternative theory which viewed totalitarianism as an internal threat to the United States and de-emphasized the centrality of the state. His theory of cultural totalitarianism focused on internal psychological manipulation rather than external political coercion. Mailer's focus on the United States was symptomatic of a broader intellectual trend towards the study of non-statist forms of totalitarianism which has yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. This article thus illuminates new dimensions of the totalitarianism debate in American political thought and provides a fuller picture of Mailer's significance as a social critic.