Oswald’s Tale (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Norman Mailer
- First Published: 1995
- Type of Work: Biography
- Time of Work: The early 1960’s and early 1990’s
- Setting: Minsk, Byelorussia; Dallas; New Orleans
- Principal Characters: Lee Harvey Oswald, Marina Oswald, Marguerite Oswald, Ruth Paine
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: Communism or communists, Assassination, Conspiracies or conspirators, Intelligence service
- Locales: New Orleans, LA, Dallas, TX, Minsk, Byelorussia
The April 19, 1995, bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City activated in many Americans the same habits of mind as did the 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy. As Norman Mailer puts it in his superb biographical study of the young man who either acted alone or was a patsy in the Kennedy killing:
Many Americans moved into the wild with no more than the strength of their imaginations. When the frontier was finally closed, imagination inevitably turned into paranoia (which can be described, after all, as the enforced enclosure of imagination—its artistic form is...
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