Mailer, Norman (Vol. 2) - Mailer, Norman 1923–
Mailer, Norman 1923–
An American novelist, essayist, and film-maker, Mailer has written The Naked and the Dead, An American Dream, Armies of the Night, and Why Are We in Vietnam? (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12, rev. ed.)
What strikes one in reading Mailer's earlier nonfiction, and strikes one with even greater force in Cannibals and Christians, is precisely this quality of exacerbated, nerve-end responsiveness to every shade and color of experience. To read Mailer in almost any of these essays is to learn all over again, if one has ever learned, just what it is like to possess the whole courage of one's perceptions and to be willing to offer them as the final proof and reference of judgment…. Mailer possesses in abundance a sophisticated and radically skeptical intelligence, a tough sanity of self-valuation which is an adjunct of his creative vision rather than the repressive schoolmaster of it. For...
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