In Marilyn (1973), Mailer suggests that American identity has been built over a chasm, a void. For all its seeming robustness the country has a hollow core and is forever in search of its roots. Similarly, Marilyn Monroe constructs a successful career upon a questionable base and is constantly in pursuit of a stable source of inspiration and strength. The person and the nation are self-made but vulnerable because neither feels quite legitimate.

America and Monroe grow up invalidated; each is an experiment, an invention that has to supply its own reasons for existence.

The author explores what happens when publicity is not enough, when the subject feels he has merely aped the style of his predecessors. This was Mailer's plight after the phenomenal popularity of The Naked and the Dead, and it may be partly responsible for his attraction to Marilyn Monroe's dilemma of having to...