None of Mailer's novels equals such classics as The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925) and The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner, 1929), but the integrity and unity of much of his fiction and nonfiction make him inimitable, for he has explored an esthetic, a nexus of fact and fiction, that Faulkner and Fitzgerald hardly approached, and that Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck barely adumbrated. Certainly John Barth, E. L. Doctorow, Robert Coover, and others have brilliantly explored the terrain upon which history and fiction intersect, but Mailer alone has dominated that terrain in work after work by pursuing the junctures between the journalist and the novelist, and between the historian and the literary figure. No American novelist has engaged politics, sports, and the arts or the engineering of modern civilization more directly, and no American writer has come near to Mailer's use of his own suggestive character to encompass...