Through the years Mailer has acquired notoriety through incidents ranging from the stabbing of his second wife to his New York mayoralty campaign, and his facility for antagonizing his audiences is well known. Whatever the circumstances of his exposure to the public, Mailer rarely fails to be "good copy" and consequently has been fair game for the media newsmakers. Because of the difficulty of reconciling this notorious Mailer with the much-admired author of The Naked and the Dead and The Armies of the Night, critics have commonly, at their most charitable, dismissed Mailer's public acts as irrelevant to his written work, or, at their least, considered them damaging to his reputation as a writer. (p. 3)

Ironically, with the awarding of the 1968 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award to The Armies of the Night, Mailer was admitted to the American literary establishment despite his continued violations of its decorum...