Mailer, Norman (Vol. 4) - Mailer, Norman 1923–
Mailer, Norman 1923–
Mailer, an American, is a novelist, essayist, social critic, and film-maker. He is one of America's most controversial and most visible literary personalities. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12, rev. ed.)
Mailer's radicalism is of an indeterminate sort, the kind that expresses itself preëminently, perhaps, in images and fictional constructs rather than in abstract schema…. [His] dislike [for any kind of collective action] lies at the heart of his first novel and has often been interpreted as making his critique of capitalist society an entirely negative one; nevertheless The Naked and the Dead is a radical novel which affirms and does so within its own logic as a literary work.
Mailer's novel has a number of faults, not the least being that it sounds at times like a pastiche of the novels about World War I. The echoes of Dos Passos, another individualist rebel, are especially insistent: the...
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