LITERATURE: AMERICAN : WRITING AND WRITERS: With Mailer's Death, U.S. Loses a Colorful Writer and Character
David P. Dillard
LITERATURE: AMERICAN : WRITING AND WRITERS:
With Mailer's Death, U.S. Loses a Colorful Writer and Character
With Mailer's Death, U.S. Loses a Colorful Writer and Character
David Wiegand, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, November 11, 2007
San Francisco Chronicle
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/
article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/11/MNH0TA9KK.DTL>
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Perhaps the quintessential American author of our era, Mailer, 84, married
six times, fathered eight children, stabbed one of his wives during a
booze-fueled party, once ran for mayor of New York City, and carried on
feuds with other writers with such bloodlust that the whiny dustup between
Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell seems like a lovers' tiff.
Scrappy, outspoken and built more like a dockworker than a pen-pusher,
Mailer had speech mannerisms that were mesmerizing even if you didn't
always grasp what he was talking about. His tone of voice, which evolved
from his birth in New Jersey on Jan. 31, 1923, and childhood in Brooklyn,
took on a mid-Atlantic accent - American with posh British undertones. For
any other writer, it would have been an odd vocal mix, but it seemed to
fit Mailer, reflecting at once his pugnacious, rough-and-tumble public
persona, his seemingly insatiable intellectual and cultural curiosity, and
his erudition. Oh, and perhaps a bit of self-aggrandizement to boot.
Mailer came from average, middle-class stock. His father, Isaac, was an
accountant born in South Africa, while his mother, Fanny, owned a
housekeeping and nursing employment agency.
After attending public schools in New York, he went to Harvard to study
aeronautical engineering. By the time he earned his degree in 1943, he'd
already made up his mind to be a writer, but had to put that idea on hold
when he was drafted into the Army and shipped to the Philippines.
In many ways, World War II was the best thing that could have happened to
the scrappy Brooklynite: He was getting material firsthand that would
later form the basis of his first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," written
after the war while he was studying in Paris on the GI Bill and published
in 1948. The book was a huge critical and commercial success, which may
seem like a good thing for a beginning writer, but then the question is
always put: What's next? It's not always easy to come up with the answer,
and Mailer flailed around at first, with his second book, "Barbary Shore,"
considered pretty much a bust.
For much of his life, Mailer pursued the concept of the great American
novel. Or, perhaps it's better to say it pursued him. The notion seemed to
haunt him. Seemingly with each new book, no matter how well reviewed it
was, the "big book" remained his version of Gatsby's green light,
something always beyond his reach on a far shore.
With F. Scott Fitzgerald having left the world after collapsing to the
floor of a Hollywood bungalow and much of Ernest Hemingway's best writing
behind him, Mailer seemed the logical choice to inherit the mantle of
great American author from the Romulus and Remus of 20th century American
letters.
[A list of Norman Mailer's works is provided at the end of this article.]
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Norman Mailer, Literary Giant
All Things Considered, November 10, 2007
National Public Radio
Norman Mailer, Author and Social Critic, Dies at 84
by Lynn Neary
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16189138>
Norman Mailer, who burst on the literary scene in 1948 and published his
most recent book just last month, died Saturday at the age of 84.
Co-founder of the Village Voice, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and the
National Book Award, he was nonetheless a controversial figure who lived
life large.
Indeed, though Mailer has been called one of the greatest writers of his
generation, he has also been vilified as an egotistical buffoon who never
lived up to the potential he showed in his debut The Naked and the Dead,
a World War II novel based in part on his own experiences as an Army
infantryman.
Mailer's second novel, Barbary Shore, was panned by critics. Several
publishers rejected his third, Deer Park, and when it finally saw print,
it met with mixed reviews. It was a pattern that would continue throughout
his career, but as Mailer told Terry Gross in a 1991 Fresh Air interview,
he never let his critics get the best of him.
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APPRECIATION
A large ego with an insecure streak
The author's flaws and mistakes were as famous as his triumphs, a fitting
fact for the era he occupied and reflected.
By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 11, 2007
Los Angeles Times
<http://www.latimes.com/news/local/
la-me-appreciation11nov11,0,7216067.story?coll=la-home-center>
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I met Norman Mailer in the early 1990s, during a party at the New York
Athletic Club. The party was for Mailer's friend Richard Stratton, who had
a novel out, and Mailer was the host, holding court at the bar, a flushed
grin on his face.
Knowing almost no one, I kept to the corners, avoiding Mailer altogether.
Still, I couldn't help looking at him periodically, and at one point, I
caught his eye.
For a moment, the two of us watched each other, until I turned away. I
hadn't taken more than a step or two, though, when I felt a tap on my
shoulder, and there was Mailer, hand extended, having come over to
introduce himself.
That story illustrates everything one needs to know about Norman Mailer,
casting the two essential, contradictory threads of his personality, the
ego and the insecurity, in sharp relief.
Mailer, after all, was the sort of author who could both dazzle and
infuriate, often within the space of a single paragraph. He was a major
talent who could not keep himself from reminding you that he was a major
talent, an astute observer of his moment, who tended to operate as if that
moment were entirely his.
He was equally famous for his writing and his exploits: the precocious
25-year-old whose 1948 debut, "The Naked and the Dead," is considered by
many the greatest American war novel ever written; the provocateur who
co-founded the Village Voice in 1955 and, 14 years later, ran for mayor of
New York on a secession ticket (Jimmy Breslin was his running mate), with
a slogan urging, "Vote the scoundrels in."
----------------------------------------
Norman Mailer 1923 - 2007
Remembrances of Norman Mailer by Marlon Brando, Liz Smith, Irving Howe,
Diana Trilling, Edward Abbey, Germaine Greer and other notables.
Compiled by Dana Cook
<http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/11/11/mailer_obit/index_np.html>
Mailer, giant of American literature, dies at 84
Paul Harris in New York
Sunday November 11, 2007
The Observer
Guardian Unlimited
<http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2209163,00.html>
There was an avalanche of tributes. 'He was a great American voice,' said
author Joan Didion. Others celebrated his ability to outrage and inform in
equal measure on almost any subject. 'He had such a compendious vision of
what it meant to be alive,' said his friend William Kennedy, author of
Ironweed. 'He had serious opinions on everything there was to have an
opinion on, and everything he said was so original.'
One of Britain's leading literary critics, Al Alvarez, said Mailer was a
'hugely influential figure who really did capture the spirit of the age -
particularly the Kennedy age'. He said that, while Mailer would be rightly
celebrated as a novelist, 'I think - and he'd hate me for saying this -
that he'll be most remembered for his essays, his reporting, his
journalism. Things like his writing on the march on the Pentagon, the
Democratic National Convention and Muhammad Ali's "Rumble in the Jungle"
are wonderful, miraculously good journalism.'
Mailer, born in New Jersey, was renowned for hard living, womanising,
drugs and fist-fights. He had nine children by six wives, including one
whom he stabbed, nearly fatally, in a drunken fight at a party. His career
took in such bizarre incidents as running for mayor of New York City in an
attempt to make his beloved metropolis the 51st state and biting off part
of the ear of actor Rip Torn.
Jimmy Breslin, author, journalist and Mailer's running mate when Mailer
ran for mayor, said: 'When you talk of Norman Mailer, right away I see van
Gogh's work boots.
'Norman was a working man. Lord, did he work. From one end of his life to
the other, he sat in solemn thought and left so much to read, so many
pages with ideas that come at you like sparks spitting from a fire. He
leaves them to a nation that has surrendered all its years to converting
truth to an untruthful excuse for killing.'
Mailer's reputation spread beyond the boundaries of his land. French
president Nicolas Sarkozy said yesterday: 'It is a giant of American
literature who has disappeared.'
----------------------------------------
From The Sunday Times
November 11, 2007
Last post for Norman Mailer
The author, as pugnacious in person as in print, died yesterday. Our
correspondent reports on the colourful life of one of the most celebrated
writers of modern times
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/
world/us_and_americas/article2848252.ece>
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The death yesterday of Norman Mailer at the age of 84 robs the American
literary world of an outrageous genius who wrote some of the finest books
of the 20th century while exhibiting a seemingly insatiable taste for
volcanic public provocation.
As a prolific author who competed ferociously for the title of Americas
Greatest Living Writer, Mailer proved a formidable but frequently erratic
novelist and a brilliant but often self-indulgent journalist.
Yet his literary exploits were repeatedly overshadowed by his tumultuous
private life. He feuded bitterly with fellow writers, he stabbed one of
his six wives, headbutted Gore Vidal, bit a chunk out of Rip Torns ear and
often declared that he couldnt get started on a new book until hed had a
good fistfight.
Mailer will be remembered as the creator of masterpieces such as The Naked
and the Dead, his searing debut war novel based on his experiences
fighting the Japanese in the Philippines; and The Executioners Song, his
Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the execution of Gary Gilmore. He was
also a radical left-wing political activist who campaigned against the war
in Vietnam and once ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York.
Yet it was his gargantuan appetites for wine and women, and his
extraordinary talent for picking a fight, that lifted him from the ranks
of his mostly reclusive literary rivals and turned him into a New York
legend. It often seemed about Mailer that if there wasnt a handy world war
to write about, he would try to start one himself.
----------------------------------------
Why Norman Mailer Mattered
Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007
By RICHARD LACAYO
Time
<http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1682741,00.html>
All through his career Mailer would carry with him a few persistent
preoccupations. One was that technology was the devil's instrument, the
means by which everything that made us human would be gradually leached
away. It wasn't just the atomic bomb that Mailer detested. He could write
about "the scent of the void that comes off the pages of a Xerox copy."
(You felt sometimes that there was no prose too purple for him not to
attempt it.) He hated the telephone so much he wouldn't give phone
interviews.
His other great topic was manhood, and the problem of how to achieve it in
a culture subsiding into room temperature. Like Papa Hemingway, Mailer was
fascinated by boxers and liked their company. He was also prone to drunken
fist fights. As for women, he had something close to a mystical view of
sex, of the female body as a mystery that a man must enter and possess.
And his hatred of the emerging order of techno-rationalism extended to a
distaste even for birth control. All that, plus the fact that in 1960 he
had stabbed his second wife Adele though badly injured, afterwards she
refused to sign a complaint against him made it inevitable that he would
become one of the main targets of feminist writers in the late '60s and
early '70s. His reply was The Prisoner of Sex, a defense of some of his
favorite writers D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and of his own embattled
notion of relations between the sexes as a perennial test of strength.
<snip>
With all those ex-wives and children to feed, there was also no end of
non-fiction literary shopwork a dozen or more books on grafitti, Picasso,
Lee Harvey Oswald, and a long one on Marilyn Monroe that borrowed heavily
from other bios, at least for the bare bones of her story. The strenuous
speculations on the meaning of Marilyn were entirely his.
There was worse. Mailer had always had the hipster's fascination with
outlaws, including himself. What was The American Dream after all but an
extrapolation from the interior life of Mailer after he had stabbed Adele
in 1960? But after the great success of the Executioner's Song, it was
Mailer's bad luck to run across another charismatic hoodlum. Jack Henry
Abbott had spent most of his adult life in prison. In the '70s he started
writing to Mailer, who was impressed enough by his furious and defiant
letters about prison life to help him turn them into a book, In the Belly
of the Beast. In 1981, with Mailer's help, Abbott was released on parole.
Six weeks later he got into an argument with a young waiter at a
restaurant in lower Manhattan, pulled out a knife and stabbed him to
death.
----------------------------------------
Books by Norman Mailer
<http://books.google.com/books?as_auth=Norman+Mailer&ots=-
HQOQYcNdf&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=author-navigational>
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Norman Mailer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mailer>
The Norman Mailer Society
<http://www.normanmailersociety.com/>
American Masters . Norman Mailer | PBS
<http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/mailer_n.html>
New York State Writers Institute - Norman Mailer
<http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/mailer.html>
Volume 50, Number 12 July 17, 2003
The White Man Unburdened
By Norman Mailer
The New York Review of Books
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16470>
Norman Mailer in the Weblogs
<http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=%22norman+mailer%
22&hl=en&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-15,GGGL:en&um=
1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=blogsearch&ct=title>
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PAL: Perspectives in American Literature - A Research and Reference Guide
- An Ongoing Project
Paul P. Reuben
Chapter 10: Norman Mailer (1923-)
Page Links: | Primary Works | Selected Bibliography 1980-Present | Study
Questions | MLA Style Citation of this Web Page |
Site Links: | Chap. 10: Index | Alphabetical List | Table Of Contents |
Home Page | March 7, 2007 |
<http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/mailer.html>
Norman Mailer
by David Levine
Norman Mailer's article "The White Man Unburdened" appeared in the July
17, 2003 issue of The New York Review. (August 2003)
The New York Review of Books
From the Review
<http://www.nybooks.com/authors/403>
Norman Mailer
Intelligence 101A
Posted May 17, 2005 | 09:25 PM (EST)
Huffington Post
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-mailer/
intelligence-101a_b_1142.html>
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Norman Mailer - The New York Times > Arts > Slide Show
<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/09/05/arts/
20070905_MAILER_SLIDESHOW_index.html>
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Norman Mailer News
News about Norman Mailer continually updated from thousands of sources
around the net.
<http://www.topix.com/who/norman-mailer>
Monday, August 9th, 2004
Norman Mailer: Why I Am Protesting the Presidency
Democracy Now
<http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/09/1341224>
August 8, 2007
Hemingway, Hitler, God - and me
In this edited extract from The Paris Review, the novelist Andrew O'Hagan
talks to Norman Mailer about writing, reincarnation and his fellow giants
of American literature
Times Online
<http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/
arts_and_entertainment/books/article2222637.ece>
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Featured Author
Norman Mailer
Reviews of Norman Mailer's Books
New York Times
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/books/author-mailer.html>
Norman Mailer Biography
Two Pulitzer Prizes
Norman Mailer Date of birth: January 31, 1923
Date of death: November 10, 2007
<http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/mai0bio-1>
Mr. Tendentious
Norman Mailer has a bone to pick. With you. And you. And ...
By Boris Kachka
New York Books
<http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/26285/>
Tributes pour in for Norman Mailer
Philip Sherwell in New York and Julie Henry
Last Updated: 2:43am GMT 11/11/2007
Telegraph
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/
news/2007/11/11/wmailer111.xml>
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Remembering Norman Mailer through his books
This entry from "The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors"
takes us on a tour of his best, his worst and his bravest.
By A.O. Scott
<http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/11/10/
norman_mailer_guide/index_np.html>
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Published on Tuesday, February 25, 2003 by the International Herald
Tribune
Gaining an Empire, Losing Democracy?
by Norman Mailer
Common Dreams
<http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0225-07.htm>
July/August 2007
Riding the Whirlwind: Norman Mailer talks with Michael Chaiken about his
independent filmmaking exploits
Film Society of Lincoln Center
<http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/ja07/mailer1.htm>
Mailer, Norman
WRITER OF 4 Articles from 1968 to 1975
SUBJECT OF 10 Articles from 1951 to 2007
2 Departments from 1968
13 Reviews from 1948 to 2007
Harpers Review
<http://www.harpers.org/subjects/NormanMailer>
THE LITERARY LIFE
Norman Mailer
A Literary Lion Roars
By Carolyn T. Hughes
Poets and Writers
<http://www.pw.org/mag/hughes.htm>
Norman Mailer on the Media and the Message
The 81-year-old author joins the fiction versus non-fiction debate,
compares literature and journalism and ruminates on old age.
By Margo Hammond
Book Editor, St. Petersburg Times
<http://www.poynter.org/dg.lts/id.57/aid.60488/column.htm>
Researching Norman Mailer
<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%
22norman+mailer%22&hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=ws>
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<http://books.google.com/books?tab=sp&sa=N&q=%
22norman+mailer%22&hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N>
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<http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=%
22norman+mailer%22&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2>
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<http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%
22norman+mailer%22&search=Search>
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<http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%
22norman++mailer%22&hl=en&sitesearch=>
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<http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/search?q=%
22norman++mailer%22&ds=jnl&ds=nom&g=s&t=all>
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The complete articles may be read at the URLs provided for each.
WEBBIB0708
Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jw...@temple.edu
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