most of Mailer's writings, both Infiction and nonfiction, he has been concerned with the role of violence in American life. In his seminal essay, "The White Negro" (1957), he contrasted individual violence to the collective violence of the state. To Mailer, the state was capable of inflicting much more damage on individuals than individuals could inflict on themselves. In fact, for Mailer, an individual act of violence might even be a defensible rebellion against the repressive nature of society. Consequently, he has tended to create fictional heroes, such as Stephen Rojack in An American Dream (1965), who renew themselves through violence. In Tough Guys Don't Dance, Mailer reverses the usual order of things in his fiction. The novel begins with its hero, Tim Madden, wondering whether the severed head he discovers in his marijuana hideaway is the gory result of a drunken evening's debauchery which turned...
Norman Kingsley Mailer (born 1923), American author, film producer and director, wrote one of the most noteworthy American novels about World War II. Only in his later political journalism did he reac...
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Biography EssayNorman Mailer's achievement lies primarily in his treatment of the conflict between man's search for self-actualization and the strictures society places upon him. Mailer has rendered t...
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Since the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, catapulted Norman Mailer to sudden fame in the late 1940s, he has been alternately praised and criticized due to his outspoken opinion...
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Norman Mailer's achievement lies primarily in his treatment of the conflict between man's search for self-actualization and the strictures society places upon him. Mailer has rendered this theme with ...
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In various newspaper columns, essays, interviews, and novels from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, Norman Mailer has brooded over the psychological and cultural implications of what he has termed the ...
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Norman Mailer has labored for most of his literary career to repudiate what he himself describes as "the one personality he found absolutely insupportable--the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something...
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After almost fifty years as a literary celebrity and a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Norman Mailer still defies critics and scholars to define his niche as a writer. Some interpreter...
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Since his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948, Norman Mailer has written some forty books, including novels, essays, political journalism, poetry, drama, and screenplays. Refer...
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[This entry was updated by J. Michael Lennon (Wilkes University) from his update in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, volume 6, pp. 162-183, of the entries by Philip H. Bufithis (...
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Norman Kingsley Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer