Mailer, Norman (Vol. 3) - Mailer, Norman 1923–
Mailer, Norman 1923–
Novelist, essayist, social critic, film-maker, and "public man," Mailer is one of America's leading (and most controversial) literary personalities. He is a prolific writer, exhibiting in his books a remarkable diversity of concern and achievement. His intensely subjective reportage and his ubiquity as a literary performer have elicited a unique profusion of critical commentary, including highest praise and screeching obloquy. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12, rev. ed.)
It is a final irony before which even he flinches that [Mailer]—who began as a middlebrow best-seller, then lapsed into obscurity—returns to popularity [with Advertisements for Myself] among a minority who find in his simple-minded intransigence on the subject of sex a metapolitics compatible with their own loss of youth and poverty. Such readers turn to Mailer not as a good writer, but as a rebel whose rebellion threatens (alas)...
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