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Detail of Biography - Norman Mailer
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Norman Mailer
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Biography - Norman Mailer
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[b]Childhood[/b][br /]
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Among major living writers, Norman Mailer is perhaps the most well-known, both in the United States and internationally. Novelist, essayist, screenplay writer, and public persona, Norman Mailer was born at Long Branch, New Jersey on January 31, 1923, to a South African immigrant Jew Isaac Barnet Mailer (Barney), and a Russian immigrant Jew, Fanny Schneider (Fan). The Schneiders were in hotel business and that is where Fanny met Barney. After about a year long courtship they got married in a large ceremony. Barney, initially, took up residence with his in-laws, but later on, finding commuting from Long Branch to Manhattan for work tiresome, the Mailers shifted to Flatbush, where Barney's sister Anne and her family lived.[br /]
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Norman was given the middle name Kingsley – after Malech, Hebrew for king. Later his mother said, "I thought Norman was perfect" – an opinion she held throughout life. Norman’s father was a struggling accountant, and the young prince grew up in a working class suburb – at the grim New York borough of Brooklyn.[br /]
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In 1927, Fanny gave birth to Barbara, their daughter. The family moved in Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights. The children got a mixed atmosphere of secular and religious ideas. Fanny had stopped keeping Kosher at her place, but Norman was sent to a Hebrew school and was taught Yiddish at home. He soon forgot his Hebrew but Yiddish stayed with him lifelong.[br /]
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The Mailers were considered superiors in the neighborhood, mainly for Barney's decent dressing and Fanny's decent home. The Mailer children were taught to keep their room tidy. They were taught the principle of respectability from the very young age. Norman was treated like a king at home and Fanny saw to it that he was treated as one at school as well. Norman always stood out at school with his highest rank in class. Once, Norman did not receive his usual rank which disturbed Fanny so much that she protested against the result and outrightly denied to sign the report card. It is said that the school had to change Norman's grade. At his school P S 161, he was awarded the prize for having highest IQ of 165. He was an avid reader from the very early age, he enjoyed writing as well. At the age of seven, he scribbled out in his notebook a novel called Invasion of Mars. He wanted his writing to look like a book, with justifiably arranged margins. His mother always preserved those two blue covered notebooks which contented the initiation of a great career. During his boyhood he enjoyed reading Tarzan series by Rice Burrough and in adolescence he read pulp magazines as well as comics and books by Rafael Sabatini and Jeffrey Farnol. His parents also nurtured his passion for reading books.[br /]
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His parents were a great influence on his life. Especially his mother, he called her a lady with an 'iron heart'. He was very much impressed with his father's way of conducting himself. Norman said later, " My father was a terribly fussy, punctilious man. A marvelous man... he had marvelous manners...was very English, as a South African can be." and "A dapper gentleman in a bewildering world, a man of such sentimentality that phrases like ' the passing parade' would always bring tears to his eyes."[br /]
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Norman enjoyed all the games that were played in the streets - football, stickball, and roller-skate hockey. The streets of Brooklyn during the depression provided some education – with its hard life, neighborhood rivalries and ‘devil may care’ philosophy. No wonder in later years Norman would survive decades of literary wars and misalliances.[br /]
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He enrolled at Boy's High, a high school reputed for its intellectual students. Going with his interest in literary activities, he started editing the student journal Physical Scientist. He was growing up in more than one sense.[br /]
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He was considered 'knowledgeable' among his friends, including in the matter of sex. He even used to teach Barbara how to blow smoke rings and how to do ballroom dance, and even how to kiss. Both siblings shared a good rapport and used to help eachother in troubled times.[br /]
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This son of ambitious parents, Norman learned that survival skills are not an entry into the establishment – for that a degree was required and a classy one too. So, like many city boys, Norman burned up the public school competition and enrolled at Harvard – determined, at 17, to become – as he put it – a ‘major writer’.[br /]
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[b]At Harvard[/b][br /]
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He recalled in an interview to Ramona Koval, presenter of Radio National’s Books and Writing, at Edinburgh International book Festival, of how he started with an engineering degree : "When I was a kid I used to build model aeroplanes and wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, so I went to Harvard. I had two choices – I could have gone to MIT and would have become an aeronautical engineer or Harvard where I knew the education for an engineer would not be as good. But the girls in Brooklyn on my block had almost no reaction to MIT and when I said I might go to Harvard, they lit up and saw me with new eyes. I was 16 years old and had the motivation. So I ended up taking engineering at Harvard and got bored with it quickly and took the minimum of courses and took writing courses instead. I came out badly educated, the engineering I didn’t remember and the writing courses were fine but there is an awful lot I never learned at Harvard."[br /]
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A short story, The Greatest Thing In The World, which he wrote for the Harvard Advocate, won the college fiction prize.[br /]
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Norman was inducted into the army in March 1944, less than a year after graduating with Honors from Harvard with BS in Engineering. His experience as a surveyor in field artillery, as an intelligent clerk in the cavalry and a rifleman with a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippinese mountains, all gave him the idea for a novel about World War II. He served as a cook too when needed, according to a fellow soldier, Private mailer ' had more combat with his supervisors than he did with the enemy'.[br /]
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Shortly after his discharge he began writing The Naked and The Dead, which was published in 1948. The war novel, a critical and commercial success was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 11 consecutive weeks and brought Mailer immediate recognition as one of America’s most promising writers. The novel remains one of the classic novels of World War II. Catapulted into instant fame, he has been at the center of national cultural consciousness ever since. He is an unfrocked prophet full of foreboding about contemporary life. He celebrates the intuitional and instinctive spirit and castigates corporate greed and the rape of nature. His disagreements with feminists are, of course, legendary.[br /]
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[b]The Fame[/b][br /]
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To say that The Naked and The Dead is a fictionalized account of a Pacific battle requires more explanations. His four years in Cambridge were very ordinary. He wrote for the school literary magazine, boxed and played dormitory football. Later, he would boast that he had been ‘a bit of an athlete’, in his John Garfield, tough alley style. Then, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, America was at War, and Mailer wondered on what he would write in his novels about. After graduation in 1943, he finally joined the army and was shipped to the Philippines, landing on Luzon at the tail end of the campaign. In the South Pacific, Norman strung telephone lines for the engineer corps, served as a cook, and even carried a rifle. A fellow soldier later remembered that he, "had more combat with his supervisors than he did with the enemy." Mailer returned home to write a novel. He would tell his dear ones that he lacked the right clothes, the right accent, and the right religion.[br /]
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[b]At Hollywood[/b][br /]
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After a small amount of work had been allotted in Hollywood of writing screenplays, Mailer wrote two more novels, Barbary Shore (1951), a novel on the Cold War, and The Deer Park (1955), a Hollywood novel about artistic integrity. In appreciation of this novel The New York Times notes : "Whatever his degree of artistic accomplishment, Mailer would seem to have the instincts of the artist, which is to say, among other things, that his approach to his material is at the bottom moral." One reviewer called it, "The year’s worst snake pit in fiction." Another critic found the plot ‘crummy’ and ‘sordid’. But by the time the book was published he had moved beyond Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Bestsellerdom was no longer his stick. The Psychic Outlaw was Mailer’s new hero; he became the prophet of hip. Along with several friends, he co-founded 'The Village Voice' (1954) and published manifestos in small circulation journals. Mailer was soon tossed off by the voice "He was bullying everybody", a compere complained – but this setback did not slow down Mailer.[br /]
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[b]Mailer At His Best[/b][br /]
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Sex, politics, drugs – in different combinations and various configurations – were throughout the 1950s favorite themes. He wrote a short story about a college girl’s (involuntary) encounter with anal intercourse – and romanticized marijuana as "the smoke of assassins." (This was before Lee Harvey Oswald made the scene). In an essay, The White Negro, Mailer took on the complicated subject of race relations. Unfortunately, his dialectical insight went over some people’s heads. After reading the essay, James Baldwin, the great black novelist, confessed, "I could not with the best will in world, make any sense out of The White Negro" (James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, New York, Dell Books, 1978 ed.)[br /]
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Mailer shows once again that he is the most versatile if not the most significant talent of his generation. But without intending to, he also points out the melancholy circumstance that he has not lived up to the expectations, which he once aroused. This is entirely reflected in his publishing of Advertisements for Myself. It is a showcase of all his previous work and his ambitious plans for the future, which uses his personality at the volume’s armature. But for Mailer, the 1950s were only a foretaste of the adulation showered on him in the 1960s. It was the unrestful era. It was "the time of his time". Meetings, protests, marches – Norman Mailer was everywhere.[br /]
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For a time, Mailer could do no wrong, his home–movies were shown in art houses and applauded by critics. Its huge influence on a generation seeked to achieve creativity and self-realization and hence in return gave Mailer a new audience and set the stage for the 60s, Mailer’s happiest, most tumultuous, and productive years. He published 17 books between 1962 and 1972, including five books were nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the Polk Award.[br /]
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He followed it up with A Fire on the Moon (1971), in which he describes the lifting of Saturn – Apollo in language born in the envy of Moby Dick and manifests destiny – language that somehow suggests there may yet be political hope in so much mechanical energy. Some transformation of minds may yet take place in outer space ! But the possibility of doom is very strong in Mailer’s own moon trip. It is his enthusiasm for a technical wizardry of which, in the end, he knows less than he does about doom. As Patrick White, the Australian novelist, says in one of his books – "Why is the world which seems so near is so hard to get hold of ?"[br /]
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In 1979, he published the critically acclaimed best-seller The Executioner’s Song, but before it, his pace of writing slowed in the 70s as The Prisoner of Sex (1971) was the only known piece which was published. The book was said to be a response to the women’s liberation movement. The Executioner’s Song was a 1000-page ‘true life novel’, which chronicled the life and death of murderer of Gary Gilmore. The book was also nominated for the American Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. All reviews praised Mailer’s artistry and agreed that The Executioner’s Song was a substantial book produced by a literary master.[br /]
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The New York Times remarked on the novel, that "It is a largely unremarkable fact about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story… This is an absolutely astonishing book."[br /]
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In mid-70s, he worked on his novel, set in Egypt of 3,000 years, named Ancient Evenings (1983). A critic wrote, "All the way through Ancient Evenings, one keeps having to absorb new rituals and ceremonies and landscapes… Or else it’s just that Mr Mailer’s story isn’t strong enough to lift us out of the prose." The general impression from Tough Guys Don’t Dance is that Mailer must have planned to relax after the appalling exertions of Ancient Evenings.[br /]
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In the 90s, Mailer published the best-selling Harlot’s Ghost, non-fiction narratives on Pablo Picasso and Lee Harvey Oswald, Reviewed by John Simon in 1991, (a critic), The New York Times remarked, "It is not easy to be sure that Mailer’s much–headlined life doesn’t color one’s judgment, but the author of Harlot’s Ghost does come across as a punch-drunk writer trying to outbox all competition real or imaginary."[br /]
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The Gospel According to the Son (1977) is a first person retelling of the four gospels. He closed the decade out with a massive retrospective of his entire career. The sections of the Time of Our Time deals in social history of postwar America, at the heart of which is Mailer’s own tangled love affair with this country. About his love for America he writes, "It’s like a wife, you’d like to throw out of the window and resume in mid-air."[br /]
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Perhaps, he best summed up his versatile abilities in Advertisement For Myself, "I became an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the act of switching a style." He is now at work on another long narrative, the subject of which is secret.[br /]
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Mailer has not only published 39 books (including 11 novels), he has written plays (and staged them), screenplays (and directed them), poems (for both Nugget and The New Yorker, among others) and essayed every sort of narrative form (including some he invented). He has reported on six sets of political conventions (1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1992, 1996), participated in scores of symposia, appeared and debated hundreds of times on college campuses from the 50s through the 90s, boxed (and fought) at several venues, and enjoyed a vigorous public life in New York and Province towns. His passions feuds, imbroglios, generosities, litigations, embarrassments and loyalties are numerous, notorious and complex.[br /]
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Happily married for nearly a quarter of a century to Norris Church, he was wedded five times previously and has nine children. A stalwart on radio and television talk shows for 40 years, he has probably been interviewed more than any other writer who has ever lived. Without being paid for his pains, he has given advice to several presidents, has run office for himself (mayor of New York), served as president of the American Chapter of PEN (an association of poets, playwrights, essayists, editors and novelists) and has won the major literary awards but for the Nobel. Co-founder of the Village Voice, he also named it, and has been the equivalent of a decathlon athlete in the effort to break down barriers between popular, underground and elite periodicals.[br /]
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[h3]Chronology of Works[/h3][br /]
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[b]February 1948[/b] The Naked and The Dead appeared.[br /]
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[b]January 1951[/b] Barbary Shore was published.[br /]
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[b]April 1955[/b] The Deer Park was published[br /]
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[b]August 1958[/b] The White Negro was published.[br /]
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[b]1959[/b] Advertisement for Myself was published.[br /]
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[b]1962[/b] Deaths for the Ladies (and other Disasters) were published.[br /]
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[b]1963[/b] The Presidential Papers was published.[br /]
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[b]1965[/b] An American Dream was published.[br /]
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[b]1966[/b] Cannibals and Christians was published.[br /]
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[b]1967[/b] The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer was published.[br /]

The Deer Park (a play) was published.[br /]

Why are We in Vietnam ? was published.[br /]

The Bullfight (a photographic narrative with text) was published.[br /]
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[b]1968[/b] The Armies of the Night (History as a Novel and The Novel as History) was published.[br /]

The Idol and the Octopus [Political Writings (on Kennedy and Johnson)] was published.[br /]

Miami and the Siege of Chicago was published.[br /]

Running Against the Machine (1969) was published.[br /]
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[b]1971[/b] The Prisoner of Sex was published.[br /]

King of the Hill was published.[br /]

Maid Stone – (A Mystery) was published.[br /]

The Long Patrol was published.[br /]
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[b]1972[/b] St. George and the Godfather was published.[br /]

Existential Errands was published.[br /]
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[b]1973[/b] A Marilyn – A Biography was published.[br /]
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[b]1974[/b] Faith of Graffiti was published.[br /]
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[b]1975[/b] The Fight was published.[br /]
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[b]1976[/b] Some Honorable Men was published.[br /]

Genius and Lust – A portrait of Henry Miller was published.[br /]
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[b]1978[/b] A Transit Narcissus was published.[br /]
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[b]January 31, 1923[/b] Norman Mailer was born.[br /]
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[b]1943[/b] He completed his graduation.[br /]
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[b]1948[/b] Served in the Army during World War II and wrote his first novel.[br /]
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[b]1968[/b] The Armies of the Night got the Pulitzer.[br /]
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[b]June 6, 1982[/b] Mailer traded his egocentric concerns of the past for a new objectivity, his prodigality of emotion and rhetoric for more modest satisfaction.[br /]
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[b]April, 1941[/b] The Harvard Advocate, the college’s literary magazine published his short story, The Greatest Thing in the World.[br /]
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[b]1958[/b] Mailer moved from Connecticut to Perry Street in Greenwich village.[br /]
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[b]March 9, 1961[/b] Pleaded guilty to assault charges; later that month he separated from Adde. During that month, met Lady Jeanne Campbell.[br /]
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[b]1996[/b] Covered the 1996 Political Conventions in the summer.[br /]
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[b]1997[/b] Mailer’s article on the 1996, campaign appeared in the January issue of George. In the spring, he began work on The Time of Our Time.[br /]
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[b]1979[/b] The Executioner’s Song – Awarded the Pulitzer Prize was published. Of a Fire on the Moon was published.[br /]
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[b][b]1980[/b][/b] Of Women and their Elegance was published.[br /]
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[b]1982[/b] Pieces and Pontifications was published.[br /]

The Essential Mailer was published.[br /]
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[b]1983[/b]
Ancient Evenings was published.[br /]
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[b]1984[/b] Tough Guys Don’t Dance was published.[br /]
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[b]1988[/b] Conversation with Norman Mailer[br /]
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[b]1991[/b] Harlot’s Ghost was published.[br /]
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[b]1994[/b] Pablo and Fernande was published.[br /]
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[b]1995[/b] Oswald’s Tale (An American Mystery) was published.[br /]
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[b]1955[/b] A Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man was published.[br /]
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[b]1997[/b] The Gospel According To The Sun was published.[br /]
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[b]1998[/b] The Time of Our Time was published.[br /]
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[h3]Chronology of Life[/h3][br /]
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[b]January 31, 1923[/b] Norman Mailer was born.[br /]
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[b]1943[/b] He completed his graduation.[br /]
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[b]1948[/b] Served in the Army during World War II and wrote his first novel.[br /]
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[b]1968[/b] The Armies of the Night got the Pulitzer.[br /]
[br /]

[b]June 6, 1982[/b] Mailer traded his egocentric concerns of the past for a new objectivity, his prodigality of emotion and rhetoric for more modest satisfaction.[br /]
[br /]

[b]April, 1941[/b] The Harvard Advocate, the college’s literary magazine published his short story, The Greatest Thing in the World.[br /]
[br /]

[b]1958[/b] Mailer moved from Connecticut to Perry Street in Greenwich village.[br /]
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[b]March 9, 1961[/b] Pleaded guilty to assault charges; later that month he separated from Adde. During that month, met Lady Jeanne Campbell.[br /]
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[b]1996[/b] Covered the 1996 Political Conventions in the summer.[br /]
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[b]1997[/b] Mailer’s article on the 1996, campaign appeared in the January issue of George. In the spring, he began work on The Time of Our Time.[br /]
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[b]The Jewish Identity[/b][br /]
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The ‘Jewish’ identity of Norman Mailer lay in the fact, as he said in The Armies of the Night, that to be a nice Jewish boy was the one role unacceptable to him. More than any other novelist of this period, Mailer projected himself into the variousness of American life. He did not become a famous novelist like Hemingway, but he became another Mailer Hero. Mailer willingly offered himself up on the public stage as both – a model and a danger.[br /]
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Mailer became recklessly and extravagantly a piece of American life because he was willing to emphasize his individuality. He would find out in every nook and corner of his psychic existence what it was like to be the most inassimilable Jew in American society. As Disraeli said on becoming Prime Minister, "I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole."[br /]
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He would play bad. But what was creative in this ‘role’ was Mailer’s belief in the validity of the most private thoughts. He made his fantasies interesting to many Americans. He would write, as if he believed in the devil. He made his most intimate wishes and fears into public symbols by becoming laughable, publicizable part of the American consciousness. He made his mind public. He was not one of that minority group, which will always feel excluded from the great American reality. He was inside this reality and on every side of it, willing to shift for a better view at moment’s notice. The American life, its power in human affairs, its fury of transformation, had found in Mailer a writer who would always find any and all of it ‘credible’, who would never regard America as "a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination".[br /]
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Mailer’s many words would always depend on his psychic intuition into the staggeringly involved experience of our time. He was indeed an ‘existential’ seeker of the truth, the uncovering of which was the real value of any situation. There was beauty, there was truth, with Mailer as the only discoverer you needed to know. These had obviously become more important to Mailer than the literary ideals that had prompted him to give out so many advance warnings, like Joyce, of a great work in progress. He would become a cultural force – that is operating like a 19th century man of letters – even as he insisted on himself as a threat to all those timid folk who would not follow him on his personal trek through the unconventional.[br /]
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Mailer’s fantasies and ideal broke into the texture of every fiction he wrote. Mailer succeeded in imposing his personal sense of things.[br /]
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Mailer’s adventurist fiction was the sense of risk. It pervaded everything in America. The American Faust was rushing to meet God or the Devil.[br /]
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His ‘new journalism’ was to dramatize this split consciousness with radical gestures. The Marxist view of the world as a consistent piece of reality – economical, social, cultural, could not have been less real at this time. Still, there was no escaping the violent eruptions created by the pressure on everything in sight of American power and wealth. But whatever Mailer’s fantasies of cultural authority in this situation, his several powerful insights were too scattered and spasmodic to make his ideas influential.[br /]
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Despite the bullying effect of his overwriting, Mailer’s typical fantasy in Why Are we in Vietnam ? of a transistor planted in the body through the rectum that may ‘contact’ the mind of God, did express the fright at the heart of contemporary consciousness. Since the Devil was assuredly loose again, man had desperately to reach the God whose hidden will was behind the force of things. This despair, Mailer’s own frantic will despite his personal cockiness – this was to make the experience of reading him equal to a plunge into the age.[br /]
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[b]The Political Variety[/b][br /]
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Mailer is a highly talented, ambitious, personal, showy and multifaceted writer. Over the three and a half decades, which have passed since the publication of his first, instantly acclaimed novel, The Naked and the Dead, he has written about 25 other books in a number of literary forms on such far-flung subjects and in such a wide variety of personal voices as to give an impression that he is not only extraordinarily prolific but in fact perversely so. He is unusually self-aware and self-reflexive writer. He has from time to time been satisfactorily admitting the effect that he has thus achieved on his readers. "The difficulty for most people who are at all interested in my work," he was saying as early as in 1958, "is that I started as one kind of writer, and I’ve been evolving into another kind of writer." The following year he described himself as "an actor, a quick-change artist" and in 1968 he noted that "People are in an incredible state of confusion about me." In an interview given in 1981, he seemed to regard this protean elusiveness as a virtue in itself, and as a source of some considerable joy to himself, "The devil in me loves the idea of being just that much of a changeling [sic]. You can never understand a writer until you find his private little vanity and my private little vanity has always been that I will frustrate expectations."[br /]
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[b]The World View[/b][br /]
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The frustration that Mailer has caused in his readers by constantly belying and outraging their expectations is writ large in the content and in the titles of the numerous essays and reviews that have grown around his works. His third novel, The Deer Park was in one paper reviewed under the title Not Even God Pornography, while his next book Advertisements for Myself prompted Alfred Kazin to ask outright How Good is Norman Mailer ? and George Steiner to pronounce on him, Naked but not Dead. Later books evoked critical comment under titles as Black Mailer, Norman X : The Literary Man’s Cassius Clay, Nightmarsh Mailer, Male, Mailer, Female by David Lodge, Dr. Mailer, I presume ?, O Mailer, O America by Denis Donoghue, the teasing A Noble for Norman ?, Mailer’s Mafia : The Journalism of a Writer who is in Danger of Becoming His Audience, Mailer us the Hilton Hotel, Mailer Rides Again : Brilliant, Idiosyncratic, Unquotable, Generalissimo Mailer : Hero of his own Dispatches by Mario Puzo, Norman Mailer : A self Creation, Norman Mailer : genuine or counterfeit ?, Norman Mailer genius or Nothing, Why Mailer wants to be a President and What Mailer has Done. There are some explicitly emotive responses such as, "When the Real Norman Mailer Stands up, Don’t lay hands on me" and "Norman Mailer, Get out of My Head !" There is a fairly comprehensive descriptive title, Norman Mailer : genius, novelist, critic, playwright, politico, journalist and general all – round shit. There is another which is straight from the shoulder question : "Can a middle-aged Man with four wives and six children be a Revolutionary ?" But a quieter and more reflective title to which most serious readers of Mailer are likely to return an echo was provided by Germaine Greer in an article written in 1971, which she called simply My Mailer Problem.[br /]
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What has Mailer done to deserve all this hullabaloo ? It seems that one crucial thing he has done better than most of his contemporary writers is to keep himself constantly in the public eye. First as an amazingly best-selling author at the age of 25; then, by promptly betraying his early promise through two or three sensationally indifferent books that followed next. Backed by his credentials as a co-founder of The Village Voice (established 1954) and a contributing editor (1953-69) of Dissent, generally became an oracle of the left, then by putting a knife into his then wife and being confined as a consequence in a mental hospital for observation; then, by running for the Mayorship of New York and threatening to run for the Presidency. For the last some years, he became general magnetic celebrity who has effortlessly drawn unto himself a whole range of contemporary American themes and issues and become something of an anti–establishment guru. Increasingly, his books have provided only the infrastructure for his fame, and the impression persists that Mailer has been not only a man of letters but also a man of action, not only a writer of books on private and public themes but himself a public figure if not a public issue.[br /]
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For all these reasons, it is not easy to unravel, follow and evaluate the variegated strands of Mailer’s work, to figure out just what he is saying and where he stands. One thing, however is clear, throughout his fictional and non-fictional writings, Mailer has been engaged with human situations as well as the predicaments of his society and his nation in a way. It displays a patent political preoccupation and political implications in a wider and more subliminal sense of the word. The final assessment of his contribution and worth proves him as one of the most insistently political novelists of our times.[br /]
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[b]Marriages[/b][br /]
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Mailer married six times. His first wife was Beatrice Silverman, whom he married in 1944 and divorced in 1952. His second wife was Adele, whom he married in 1954. Again, the marriage did not turn out to be a blessing. Mailer tried to stab her in 1960, and was put into Bellevue Hospital for the medical report labeled him 'both homicidal and suicidal'. The details of his other alliances are not available but in his sixth wife Norris, Mailer has found the companionship he was looking for all his life. They share their birthdays and the fact that both have divorced their previous spouses. In fact, they were selected as one of the most loving couples by CBS News Sunday Morning. Mailer have eight children from his six wives.[br /]
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[b]The Works And The Author[/b][br /]
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Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead, often acclaimed as "the greatest novel to come out of World War – II", was based on his war experiences in the Philippines and written immediately after the event. The substantial military action described in it, are the adventures of a patrol party sent out on a reconnaissance, and, as Mailer later told the Paris Review interviewer, "In the early days [of writing] I was annoyed at how long it was taking me to get to the walk." Indeed, the patrol gets going only after two-thirds of the novel is over, and it may be wondered that if it takes a novelist all that long to get to the point, surely the point of the novel may then lie elsewhere.[br /]
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The Naked and the Dead is not so much of a war novel. It is a political novel. It has all the trappings and the milieu of a war novel.[br /]
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The chief dramatic interest of the story lies in the explicit ideological confrontations that are set up between General Cummings, the highest ranked and the most powerful character in the book who

is in love with the idea of absolute power, even more, is the idea of absolute power for himself, allied with Sergeant Croft, the general’s double, who in fact gets to exercise more naked power in his lower rank. On the one hand, and as the counterpoint to them on the other hand, Lieutenant Robert Hearn, is a self-confessed liberal to the General’s fascist. With his sure instinct for subjugating and vanquishing any threat to our questioning of his power, General Cummings takes into his own personal care lieutenant Hearn by appointing him his aide-de-camp and then systematically contriving situations in which to humiliate, degrade and eventually break him into submission. Afterwards, he transfers Hearn to be the officer immediately superior to Sergeant Croft to let the latter finish off his good work, and this Croft does comprehensively by coldly engineering the sudden, premature and unnecessary death of the lieutenant of liberalism. Between the stones of obsessive power, Hearn with his humanist dilemmas is truly ground to extinction. There takes place two major confrontations between General Cummings and Lt Hearn, which constitutes the political core of the novel :[br /]
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"I don’t care what kind of man you give me if have him long enough I’ll make him afraid… You aren’t capable of understanding it, but I can tell you Robert, that to make an Army work you have to have every man in fitted into a fear ladder. (N&D pg. 151)."[br /]
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The other final confrontation between Cummings and Hearn is equally a set piece and starts abruptly with Cummings asking, "Have you ever wondered, Robert, why we are fighting this war ?" In his long, ‘positional’ statement in reply, Hearn wonders whether there is any ‘objective right on their side, adds that anyhow it’s a bad thing when millions of people are killed because one joker has to get something out of his system," and concludes provocatively enough : "There’s times when I think it’s Gandhi who’s right." (N & D, 274).[br /]
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Mailer seems in these political exchanges to denounce authoritarianism and fascism, and to be on the side of any resistance or alternative to them, be it Marxism, liberalism or even Gandhism. But in the context of the action in the novel Mailer’s affinities and affiliations seem to be, to say the least, ambiguous. The contradiction between the theme and the plot, the message and the medium, may also be seen as one between the ideological thrust of the novel and its human core, which remains unreconciled. The Naked and The Dead is a novel not of living political ideas but of mechanical political ideologies. It sets up against each other in very crude and schematic manner. The central criticism to be made of it when considered as a political novel is not that the author gets his politics confused or ‘wrong’ in it, but he has achieved a mere ‘political document’, as Diana Trilling calls it, that the novel : "takes its ultimate stand not in art but in doctrine." Thus, the novel fails to achieve the artistic integrity of a true political novel. [br /]
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[b]Criticism And Fame[/b][br /]
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The Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), these two books harp too obviously and hardly on politics. These novels have suffered from similar criticism that was suffered by The Naked and the Dead. The ‘real subject’ of Barbary Shore is the effect on modern life of the failure of the Russian revolution. The novel seeks to work out in a serious manner. It brings together in a rooming house in Brooklyn Heights, six characters. In the midst of cloak-and-dagger setting, the novel offers the totalitarianism that Mailer had already identified in The Naked and The Dead as man’s worst enemy. It is alleged to be equally dominant in the USA and the USSR. War after war is argued to be inevitable due to sheer economic necessity, and in the conclusion, mankind is seen as headed for utmost savagery, its destination being the shores of Barbary.[br /]
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If not identities, we again have characters with clear political identifications in The Deer Park published in 1955. In an interview given a month after the book was published, Mailer readily agreed that the book was ‘totally about sex’ but would still insist that it was ‘also totally about morality’. Mailer had come to realize "that politics was failing him as a material of fiction, as it had failed him as a means of saving the world." Mailer published three novels within seven years.[br /]
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[b]The White Negro[/b][br /]
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When An American Dream (1965), was published, a critic came out with a remark that it was ‘an intensely private novel’ and not ‘a political novel’ – though it had a very revealing onset : "I met Jack Kennedy in November 1946. We were both war heroes and had just been elected to Congress." But by the time the action begins, the protagonist Rojack has gone on to become a professor of Existentialist Psychology in New York and neither Kennedy nor Congress is ever heard of again. The novel includes in its cast a Mafia boss, an enormously rich and starkly powerful Irishman, and several policemen investigating with surrealistic minatory overtones the murder of his wife committed by the hero. The imaginative focus of the novel is trained elsewhere; on sex and on violence, which are always seen together. The central inversions of the novel are to make love is in effect to make war on the other person, and to kill a person is often to feel most lovingly and tenderly towards him/her. Within the larger framework, Mailer also suggests a number of other original formulations like the hero Rojack as an embodiment of Mailer’s favored concept of the ‘Hipster’ or the ‘White Negro’ (a racial, sexual, mystical concept first propounded by Mailer in 1957.[br /]
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Not surprisingly, all this provoked Elizabeth Hardwick to remark on all his novels as : Morally foolish and intellectually empty. Mailer served to help Kate Millet to illustrate her key concept in the opening chapter of Sexual Politics (1970) about the word ‘politics’. He proved himself to be an outstanding male chauvinist. Mailer promptly joined issue by publishing The Prisoner of Sex (1971).[br /]
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Far from politics having run out on him as a novelist he had now more or less pushed upon him another set of attitudes and ideas, another ideological battle in which to test the ‘hipster radicalism’ compellingly embodied in the figure of his latest hero, as the nameless protagonist of his short story The Time of Her Time (1959).[br /]
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An American Dream came to assume unsuspected political implications posto facto. The daringly oblique political slant of Mailer’s next novel Why Are We in Vietnam ? (1967) was a deliberate artistic strategy. The utterly topical title of the book was fully matched by a total absence within its covers of any reference to Vietnam, except the very last line. In the novel itself, there is no obvious politics, no ideology and indeed, no Vietnam. The novel has an allegorical story of violence in the form of a shooting holiday to Alaska taken by the 17-year-old hero narrator together with his father. It is depicted as the grossest all – American business corporation type of a ‘competitive prick’ from Texas, and the hint of an association between him and another impervious Texas.[br /]
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The novel is narrated in a ceaseless self-reflexive style of disc-jockey talk, which combines a mock-stream of consciousness style called ‘a stream-of-conch’ in the novel (P. 18) – with far the greatest proportion of sexual, chiefly anal, swear – words even during which he undergoes his initiation into fear and violence, and a confrontation with his own basic urge for these emotions and for death. The implication is that the reason why Americans are in Vietnam is the same why they are in Alaska. The narrator’s father is like any father used in any novel in the English language. In a

recent study review, American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam, Mailer’s novel is praised for having "gotten Vietnam right in large measure by going at it in what may have seemed at the time to be all the wrong ways."[br /]
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The Executioner’s Song (1979) goes beyond even the Capotesque documentary novel by claiming to be ‘a factual account’ of the last months of Gary Gilmore, the Utah convict sentenced to death who then insisted on being actually executed rather than have his sentence commuted.[br /]
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[b][b]Presenting His Times[/b][/b][br /]
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It is evident that the uses of being Norman Mailer are enormous and in their own way valuable. Even his greatest ideological adversaries admit to him that he is not only being infant terrible but well and truly a child of his times. Mailer is ‘authentically American’. Diana Trilling has stated that "he has engaged in politics… even in years when it has not been in literary fashion," and that "his novelist’s mind is peculiarly violable by idea, even by ideology" – as distinct, one supposes from Henry James’ ! Eminent not for his political wisdom but for his enthusiasm, Mailer has been fascinated in turn by a whole variety of political ideas and ideologies including some, which have been all his own and thus served as an intellectual ‘battle ground of history’. As an artist he has attempted some novels, which are palpably political and some others which are only indirectly so, addressing thus both ‘politics as politics’ and ‘politics as a part of everything else in life’.[br /]
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Altogether, he remains, in Robert Alter’s phrase, "The most stubbornly political of living American novelists", if by stubborn is meant not ideologically bound nor imperviously foolish but the most constantly and vigorously engaged of writers. In him, the political novel in America has found a new dynamism and several new voices.[br /]
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[b]Norman Mailer and Post-War Culture[br /]
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Realism and Naturalism[/b][br /]
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International literary modernism has often been characterized by its preoccupation with its own structure, language, and self-conscious place in artistic tradition. As the post-war period was making clear, the American novel, it might borrow modernist techniques, still would concentrate its powers on the efforts to bring a non-literary or even an anti-literary reality into the novel’s special perspective, to renovate more by the disruption of content than by self-consciousness of form. In Europe, rebellion might still be carried on through the aristocratic manipulation of aesthetic forms, but in America writers sought to discover and portray varieties of human nature beyond those that could be encompassed by bourgeois comforts or definitions of society. The urban novel had gradually given its license to an almost sociological urge to catalogue the human indiscrepancies between American myth and American reality. It’s hidden message proclaimed that if the typical was central, then perhaps the ‘deviant’ part of each of us might offer salvation in the conformist wilderness. In the 1930s, realist and naturalist fiction could explicitly support a liberal or radical critique of American Society.[br /]
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In 1950s, especially such anarchism could be left or right in political complexion, until the more personally oriented politics of the late 1960s forged a new political union. But throughout the early post-war period an exalted sense of profession that went beyond mere expertise and into sensibility became an essential part of the writer’s image before the world. The one writer of the war generation who most elaborately attempts to mediate all these influences while he remains open to the strongest trends of post-war culture is Norman Mailer. A year younger than Kerouac, Mailer began his career in The Naked and the Dead (1948) as an imitator and extender of Dos Passos, although, in the manner of second generation, he did not change older forms so much so that he was self-conscious about their application. At least until The Prisoner of Sex (1971), Mailer’s career forms a continuing meditation on the varieties of post-war novelistic style that orchestrates the naturalism of Dos Passos, the hard-edged neighborhood fatalism of Farrell, and the mythic natural rhythms of Steinbeck into concert with the quintessentially post-war motif of the writer as a special person with a special mission.[br /]
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Hemingway’s careful fiction of the isolated writer–hero becomes in Mailer’s work the writer-hero as Weathervane in the winds of culture – focal point for Mailer’s special combination of modernist stylistic self-consciousness and naturalistic political self-consciousness. ‘The end of epic’ could be a chapter in the history of post-war fiction, as the generation of war novelists wondered if peace would ever furnish so grand a theme as war. In his Jamesian phrase, he did not have the ‘sense of past’ necessary to write about ‘the culture of Europe and the collision of America upon it’. The product therefore as much of Mailer’s literary aspirations as of his actual experiences, The Naked And The Dead appeared almost, as it were, on schedule, the first war novel to be a great critical and popular success. It was a vast fabric of American diversity pitched on a Pacific island, with no real central character, certainly no hero, and a plot that focussed less on the war with the Japanese than on the metaphysical political conflict between the liberal Lieutenant Hearn and the conservative General Cummings. The action is pseudo-historical – the effort to capture the island of Anopopei in the Philippines – but the novel is so concerned with the interplay of the lives of the men that public history seems actually more suspended that fatally rushing onward.[br /]
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Much time is spent arguing about strategy, going on missions, and thinking about the past. When the battle is won, it happens by accident. The grand strategy of General Cummings is not useless, but its intricacies and its intellectual power seem primarily to be human ways of taking up time, while nature and chance bring in their revenges. After the narrative sweep of The Naked and The Dead, Mailer’s later work becomes much more personal, but already in The Naked and The Dead, the naturalist assumption of interpretive authority was being undermined.[br /]
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In Barbary Shore (1951), his second novel, he shifts decisively to the first person. The narrator has lost his memory. He can no longer tell fact from fiction, memory from imagination : "Probably I was in the war", his only proof a scar on his head that seems to be a war wound. Set in a rooming house of Brooklyn, Barbary Shore is more the stuff of political allegory than of history.[br /]
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It argues the interrelation of the political and psychological, the irrelevance of history that is not personal. Mailer was becoming fascinated by the psychology of politics, or as he explained in an article written in the early 1950s, the effort to build a bridge between Mark and Freud. Mailer explored the same theme of violence, competition, and assertion that had been present in The Naked and The Dead, but now in a content of peacetime impotence, where sensibility and emotion were constantly being into question by a Cold War America. Too much of a romantic, finally to accept the cool professionalism of Jones, Mailer still embraced the image of a writer as outsider, and after censorship problems with The Deer Park (1955), he brought out his most resonant challenge to the grey-flannel anonymity of the 1950s – Advertisements for Myself (1959). [br /]

The tone in the novel was defiantly personal, as Mailer feathered together fiction, political essay,[br /]
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poetry, literary criticism, and autobiography to present himself, the working writer, model-1959. Mailer sought to control the growing gaps between his public, personal, and professional selves, by the subtly calculated medium of ‘advertisements’ – a necessary schizophrenia for the novelist that he had predicted in his short-story, The Man Who Studied Yoga. In American terms the formula might be considered a way to avoid both F Scott Fitzgerald’s searing self-exposure in The Crack-up (1936) and Hemingway’s own sternly elegant displacement in Across the River and into the Trees (1950).[br /]
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His own vision of America became increasingly enveloped in a personal mythology of disease and mental disorder that was purgeable only through writing that suited the work to its subject instead of imposing a falsely clarifying vision. An American Dream (1965) outraged many critics by its seemingly autobiographical fantasies. But after The Naked and The Dead, Mailer never again wrote in anything resembling a third-person narrative, and believed the third-person narratives of a writer like E M Forster was no longer possible in post-war America. Why are We in Vietnam ? (1961) reworked Hemingway and Faulkner’s theme of the hunt into a book-length monologue by a young Texan, whose fundamentally 19th-century moral values are over-lain with all the slogans, symbols, and icons of American popular culture. The Armies of the Night (1968) completed Mailer’s growth out of his naturalist past by being both first person and third person at the same time – a retrospective look at the 1967, History as a Novel and The Novel as History were the subtitles of its two sections, and in his later work, as well as in the three films he has made, Mailer has constantly pointed out the ways in which factuality and history need the shaping power of imagination to make them ‘real’.[br /]
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Mailer’s concentration on the writing style as the image of the individual contemplating the complexity of American experience coincides with the rediscovery of the power of picaresque intimacy by post-war writers otherwise as desperate as Kerouac and Saul Bellow. The romantic, first-person perspective might hope to balance or at least find a refuge from the growing pressure of inhuman events. But in other hands, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, naturalist fatality had become paranoid surrealism, drawing on the facts of national life and cliches of popular culture. Mailer himself had worked the vein, most deeply in An American Dream. But his own politics finally had a streak of practicality that issued, however, eccentrically, in journalism, reportage, and a fascination with the mystery of public personality for example, in his books on Mohammed Ali, (1971) and Marilyn Monroe, (1973).[br /]
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In the complementary urge, more akin to science fiction than to picaresque adventure, the naturalist contemplation of History was not personalized. Everything was fatally connected and everything fatally explained while some novelists took up the special problems of groups and others investigated the daily life of particular worlds and places, the paranoid novel created order through mockery and exaggeration, exposing in its satire the anonymity and inhumanity to which its readers were too easily getting accustomed. History was no longer a pattern of factually and philosophically analyzable causes; it was a nightmare, an allegory of good and evil, a metaphysical comic book.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] In 1941, Norman Mailer wrote The Greatest Thing in the World and it won Story Magazines Eighth Annual College Contest and a $100 prize.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] On May 25, 1960, Mailer received a $1,500 award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] In 1969, his work The Armies of the Night (1968), won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] In 1979, Mailer wrote biography of the life and career of Marilyn Monroe, and published a highly successful true-life novel The Executioner’s Song, which put another feather in his cap in the form of the second Pulitzer Prize.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] On April 23, 1994, he received the Harvard University’s Signet Society medal for Achievement in Arts.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] In 1995, preceded by experts in The New Yorker and New York Review of Books, Oswald’s Tale : An American Mystery was published on May 12. Received Honorary Doctor of Humane letters from Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on May 27, the same year.[br /]
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