The Naked and the Dead | A Small Trumpet of Defiance: Politics and the Buried Life in Norman Mailer's Early Fiction
In the following essay, Miller delineates social and political themes in Mailer's early fiction.
In one of the Presidential Papers Mailer wrote, "Our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground, there has been the history of politics which is concrete, practical, and unbelievably dull ... and there is the subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation." Much of Mailer's writing, like much of the American writing from which he consciously borrows, is concerned with such dualities. As he declared in "The White Negro," Mailer finds the...
[The entire page is 1491 words long]
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