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Norman Mailer: Works and Days

Criticism

A selective bibliography of criticism of Mailer's work: books, essays, and chapters, annotated.

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A selective, annotated bibliography of criticism of Mailer’s work as a whole or across several books: monographs, collections, essays, and book chapters. Criticism of a single book is listed on that book’s page, under Criticism.

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A

  • Adams, Laura, editor. Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up. Port Washington; London: Kennikat Press, 1974. register Fourteen essays and reviews and one interview examining Mailer’s protean activities. Includes two essays on Mailer’s cosmology, a long bibliography and Adams’s useful introduction.
  • Adams, Laura. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio UP, 1976. register Good discussion of themes and techniques, especially early narrators; includes description of extra-literary activities.
  • Aldridge, John W. “Mailer, Burns, and Shaw.” After the Lost Generation: A Study of the Writers of Two Wars, Arbor House, 1985, 133–156. register Reprint, with an introduction by Norman Mailer. In his introduction Mailer says, “Aldridge was the nearest guideline to absolute truth that the working novelist had in my young days.” See 85.14.
  • Aldridge, John W. Classics and Contemporaries. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992, 54–58. register Contains Aldridge’s reviews of Genius and Lust (76.12), The Long Patrol (71.29), and Harlot’s Ghost (91.26).
  • Algren, Nelson. “New York: Rapietta Greensponge, Girl Counselor Comes to My Aid.” Who Lost An American, Macmillan, 1963, 1–29. register Satirical portrait of Mailer (Norman Manlifellow) and James Baldwin (Giovanni Johnson) and other New York literary figures. See 63.10.
  • Amis, Martin. “Mailer: The Avenger and the Bitch.” The Moronic Inferno (Jonathan Cape / Viking), 1986. register See 86.42.
  • Anderson, Chris. “Norman Mailer: The Record of a War.” Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987, 82–132. register Concrete reading of Mailer’s “rhetoric of self-dramatization,” with deft discussion of Mailer’s “Left-conservatism.”
  • Apple, Max. “Inside Norman Mailer.” The Oranging of America and Other Stories, Grossman, 1976, 49–60. register One of the best comic fantasy struggles with a larger-than-life Mailer.
  • Arlett, Robert M. “The Veiled Fist of a Master Executioner.” Criticism, 1987, 215–2232. register xamination of free indirect speech in The Executioner’s Song (79.14).

B

  • Bailey, Jennifer. Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist. New York: Harper & Row, 1979, 140–142. register Provides extended summaries of his work from a feminist perspective. Bailey sees Advertisements for Myself (59.13) as the key transitional work.
  • Balbert, Peter. “From Lady Chatterly’s Lover to The Deer Park: Lawrence, Mailer, and the Dialectic of Erotic Risk.” Studies in the Novel, 1990, 67–81. register Best study of Lawrence’s influence. See 90.2.
  • Barnes, Hazel. “The Negative Rebels: The Apolitical Left.” An Existential Ethics, University of Chicago Press, 1967, 56–96. register Professional philosopher’s sympathetic examination of Mailer’s existential credentials.
  • Begiebing, Robert J. Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer. Columbia; London: University of Missouri Press, 1980. register Close reading of major works from Barbary Shore (51.1) on; fine discussion of Mailer’s “heroic consciousness.”
  • Begiebing, Robert J. “The Magician as Tragic Hero.” Toward a New Synthesis: John Fowles, John Gardner, Norman Mailer, UMI Research Press, 1989, 87–125. register Demonstration of how Mailer uses metafictional technique but rejects postmodern negativism. Important study of Ancient Evenings (83.18).
  • Begiebing, Robert J. The Territory Around Us: Collected Literary and Political Journalism, 1982–2015. BookBaby, 2015. register Discusses Mailer and other American authors at a transformative moment in his career.
  • Berthoff, Warner. “Witness and Testament: Two Contemporary Classics.” Fictions and Events, Dutton, 1971, 288–308. register One of the first extended treatments of The Armies of the Night (68.8), which Berthoff places—along with The Autobiography of Malcolm X—in the American tradition of personal witness and “the saving counterforce of personality.”
  • Bloom, Harold, editor. Norman Mailer. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1986. register Sixteen reviews and essays covering Mailer’s major works and emphasizing the influence of Hemingway, with Bloom’s brief introduction.
  • Bloom, Harold, editor. Norman Mailer. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. register Thirteen reviews and essays focusing on Mailer’s later works.
  • Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988, 207–210, 327–336. register Useful to gauge how Mailer’s public image has alienated an important critic.
  • Bozung, Justin, editor. The Cinema of Norman Mailer: Film is Like Death. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. register A collection of mixed contributions: essays and memoirs from critics, collaborators, and Mailer himself (67.21 and 71.25), some reprinted, but mostly original texts including many stills from Mailer’s films.
  • Braudy, Leo, editor. Norman Mailer: a Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972. register Thirteen essays on Mailer’s work through Of a Fire on the Moon (71.1); includes Steven Marcus interview (64.1) and a thoughtful introduction with useful insights into Miami and the Siege of Chicago (68.25).
  • Braudy, Leo. “Maidstone: A Mystery by Norman Mailer.” Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction and Popular Culture, Oxford, 1991, 60–63, 145–151. register Rpt: Adams (1974). Informed comment on Mailer’s film and the Mailer-Pynchon dichotomy.
  • Brookeman, Christopher. “Norman Mailer and Mass America.” American Culture and Society Since the 1930s, Schocken, 1987, 150–170. register Staid overview of Mailer as “a personal index of American history since the Second World War.”
  • Bryant, Jerry H. “The Moral Outlook.” The Open Decision: The Contemporary American Novel and Its Intellectual Background, Free Press, 1970, 369–394. register Authenticity, courage and the belief that “self-discovery must precede the establishment of satisfactory societies” in the early novels of Mailer.
  • Bufithis, Philip H. Norman Mailer. New York: Ungar, 1978. register Perhaps the most readable and reliable study of Mailer’s early work.
  • Busch, Frederick. “The Whale as Shaggy Dog.” When People Publish: Essays on Writers and Writing, Iowa University Press, 1986, 65–82. register Argues persuasively for the influence of Moby-Dick on “The Man Who Studied Yoga” (56.25). See 51.2.

C

  • Capote, Truman. Conversations with Capote. New York: New American Library, 1985, 112–116, passim. register Capote criticizes The Executioner’s Song (79.14).
  • Cappell, Ezra. “Hemingway’s Jewish Progeny.” The Mailer Review, 2016, 208–228. register

F

  • Foster, Richard Jackson. Norman Mailer. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1968. register Rpt: Lucid (1971); partial in Bloom (1986). This monograph, one of the first extended treatments of Mailer’s work, is still one of the best. Excellent on Mailer’s urgent, “forcing style.”

G

H

  • Hendin, Josephine. “American Rebels are Men of Action.” Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945, Oxford University Press, 1978, 117–144. register Feminist critique focusing on the “fixed principles” of Mailer’s work: “anger and the adversary relation.”
  • Hersey, John. “The Legend on the License.” Yale Review, 1980, 1–25. register Attack on the veracity of The Executioner’s Song (79.14).
  • Hesla, David. “The Two Roles of Norman Mailer.” Adversity and Grace: Studies in Recent American Literature, University of Chicago Press, 1968, 211–238. register Argues that Mailer fails as a thinker and ignores earlier intellectual leaders.
  • Hicks, Granville. Literary Horizons: A Quarter Century of American Fiction. New York: New York University Press, 1970, 273–290. register Reviews of four Mailer narratives by Saturday Review’s longtime literary reviewer and Mailer misconstruer.
  • Hollowell, John. “Mailer's Vision: "History as a Novel, the Novel as History.” Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel. 1977, UNC Press, 1977-11, 87–125. register First major appraisal of Mailer as a New Journalist, with excellent bibliography.
  • Horn, Bernard. “War: The Presence of Moby-Dick in the Naked and the Dead.” American Quarterly, 1982, 379–395. register Definitive. Rpt: Mailer Review (2016), 379–85. See 51.2.

J

  • Jameson, Fredric R. “The Great American Hunter, or Ideological Content in the Novel.” College English, 1972, 180–199. register Marxist critique which argues that Mailer is dependent on the very diseases and poisons of technology that he condemns.
  • Johnson, Diane. “Death for Sale: Norman Mailer on Gary Gilmore.” Terrorists and Novelists, Knopf, 1982, 87–96. register One of the few commentators to question the truthfulness of The Executioner’s Song (79.14).

K

  • Karl, Frederick R. American Fictions, 1940–1980. New York: Harper & Row, 1983, 178–182. register Extravagant praise for Why Are We in Vietnam? (67.15) and delineation of Mailer’s concern for a schizophrenic America.
  • Kaufmann, Donald. Norman Mailer: The Countdown (The First Twenty Years). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. register Pioneering discussion of the beast-seer conflict in the early work which overlooks Mailer’s political interests.
  • Kaufmann, Donald L. Norman Mailer: Legacy and Literary Americana. 2014. register
  • Kellman, Steven G. “Mailer's Strains of Fact.” Southwest Review, 1983, 126–133. register Richly allusive generic discussion of The Executioner’s Song (79.14).
  • Kernan, Alvin B. “The Taking of the Moon: The Struggle of the Poetic and Scientific Myths in Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon.” The Imaginary Library: An Essay on Literature and Society, Princeton UP, 1982, 130–161. register Rpt: Bloom (1986). Perhaps the best thing written on Mailer’s narrative of the Apollo 11 mission.
  • Kuberski, Philip. “The Metaphysics of Postmodern Death: Mailer’s Ancient Evenings and Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover.” English Literary History, 1989, 229–254. register Mailer and Merrill against Cartesian mechanism and postmodern despair.

L

  • Landow, George P. Elegant Jeremiahs: The Sage from Caryle to Mailer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986, 101–104, 128–129, 144–150. register Careful tracing of the pattern of definition, revilement, warning and visionary promise in Mailer, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and earlier writers such as John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau.
  • Langbaum, Robert. “Mailer's New Style.” The Modern Spirit: Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature, Oxford University Press, 1970, 147–163. register Rpt: Bloom (1986). Important essay on the evolution of Mailer’s “hallucinated realism.”
  • Leeds, Barry H. The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer. New York: NYU Press, 1969. full text register First major study of Mailer’s work; valuable for its analysis of An American Dream (65.7), and consideration of The Armies of the Night (68.8) and Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters) (62.3).
  • Leeds, Barry H. “Mailer and Marilyn: Prisoners of Sex.” North Dakota Quarterly, 1991, 110–117. register “The coherence of Mailer’s vision of [Marilyn] Monroe, of women, and of heterosexual love.”
  • Leeds, Barry H. “Boxing as a Moral Paradigm in the Works of Norman Mailer.” The New Review, 1992, 12–16. register The most complete discussion of the topic.
  • Leeds, Barry H. “Tough Guy Goes Hollywood: Mailer and the Movies.” Take Two: Adapting the Contemporary American Novel to Film, Popular Press, 1994, 154–168. register Most nuanced discussion of the adaptation of Tough Guys Don’t Dance (84.17) to the screen.
  • Leeds, Barry H. The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer. Bainbridge Island, Wash.: Pleasure Boat Studio, 2002. register Examination of Mailer’s later works, including an interview with Mailer, and a deft descriptive chapter, “The Critical Climate: Books on Mailer.”
  • Lehan, Richard. A Dangerous Crossing: French Literary Existentialism and the Modern American Novel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973, 81–95. register Mailer’s cosmology as an existential recreation.
  • Leigh, Nigel. “Getting It Wrong: The Cinema of Norman Mailer.” Journal of American Studies, 1990, 399–413. register Comment on Mailer’s films and those made from his novels.
  • Leigh, Nigel. Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990. register Leigh writes about Mailer and power from a Foucauldian perspective, but ignores the nonfiction narratives. Excellent readings of Why Are We in Vietnam? (67.15) and Ancient Evenings (83.18). Many misquotations, typos, incorrect page numbers.
  • Lennon, J. Michael. “Mailer’s Radical Bridge.” Journal of Narrative Technique, 1977, 170–188. register Discussion of point of view in Mailer as it relates to his thought.
  • Lennon, J. Michael. “Mailer’s Sarcophagus: The Artist, the Media, and the ‘Wad.’.” Modern Fiction Studies, 1977, 179–187. register How Mailer’s view of his audience helps shape his work.
  • Lennon, J. Michael; Strozier, Charles B. “Empathy and Detachment in the Narratives of Erikson and Mailer.” Psychohistory Review, 1981, 18–32. register Comparison of the introspective-empathic narratives of Mailer and Erik Erikson.
  • Lennon, J. Michael, editor. Critical Essays on Norman Mailer. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. register Ten reviews and ten essays, including two original ones: Robert F. Lucid’s overview of his proposed biography and Michael Cowan’s on Mailer’s Americanness. Introduction summarizes critical response to Mailer’s work.
  • Lennon, J. Michael. “Mailer's Cosmology.” Modern Language Studies, 1986, 18–29. register Delineation of the “three linked strands” of Mailer’s cosmology: 1) universe in process, 2) intensified free will and 3) intensified presence of evil.
  • Lodge, David. “The Novelist at the Crossroads.” The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism, Cornell UP, 1971, 3–34. register Masterful delineation of the origins and possibilities of the nonfiction novel, including The Armies of the Night ([[68.8).
  • Lounsberry, Barbara. “Norman Mailer’s Ages of Man.” The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction, Greenwood Press, 1990, 139–189. register Careful exploration of the parallels between Advertisements for Myself (59.13) and Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”
  • Loving, Jerome. Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017. register A study of the relationship between Mailer and Jack Abbott.
  • Lowell, Robert. “A Conversation with Ian Hamilton.” American Poetry Review, 1978, 23–27. register Lowell says Mailer’s portrait of him in The Armies of the Night (68.8) is “the best, the only thing written about me as a living person.”
  • Lucid, Robert F. “Introduction.” The Long Patrol: 25 Years of Writing from the Work of Norman Mailer, World, 1971, xi–xxvii. register “The Ambition of Norman Mailer” could serve as the title to this brilliant recapitulation of Mailer’s career through Of a Fire on the Moon (71.1). See 71.29.
  • Lucid, Robert F., editor. Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work. Boston: Little Brown, 1971. register First major collection of essays: 13 on his work, four on his life and Paul Carroll’s interview (68.1). Contains checklist of his work and important introduction in which Lucid attempts to resolve the apparent conflict between Mailer’s public and artistic activities.
  • Lucid, Robert F. “Norman Mailer: The Artist as Fantasy Figure.” Massachusetts Review, 1974, 581–595. register How increasingly greater demands on Mailer have made him disassemble himself into various avatars and employ new narrative strategies. Indispensable.
  • Lucid, Robert F. “Three Public Performances: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Mailer.” American Scholar, 1974, 447–466. register Subtle exploration of the love-hate relationship of three public writers and their audiences.

M

  • Macdonald, Dwight. “The Bright Young Men in the Arts.” Esquire, 1958-09, 38–40. register Besides Mailer, Macdonald chooses James Baldwin in the prose category and mentions Truman Capote, Norman Podhoretz, John Updike and Flannery O’Connor. Macdonald says Mailer’s failures are “more interesting than the successes of less-talented writers” and praises “his enthusiasm for general ideas.”
  • Marks, Barry A. “Civil Disobedience in Retrospect: Henry Thoreau and Norman Mailer.” Soundings 2, 1979, 144–165. register Inevitable and careful comparison.
  • Marx, Leo. “‘Noble Shit’: The Uncivil Response of American Writers to Civil Religion in America.” Massachusetts Review, 1973, 109–739. register The virtues of the American vernacular in Mailer, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain and others.
  • Matz, Charles. “Mailer's Opera.” Opera News, 1970-02-21, 14–16. register See 70.4.
  • Maud, Ralph. “Faulkner, Mailer, and Yogi Bear.” Canadian Review of American Studies, 1971, 69–75. register Why Are We in Vietnam? (67.15) and William Faulkner’s “The Bear” are related to Indian stories, with an ecological emphasis.
  • McConnell, Frank D. “Norman Mailer and the Cutting Edge of Style.” Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth and Pynchon, University of Chicago Press, 1977, 58–107. register Traces the shift from ideological to “visionary” politics in Mailer’s work.
  • McCord, Phyllis Frus. “The Ideology of Form: The Nonfiction Novel.” Genre, 1986, 59–79. register Convincingly sorts out the generic status of The Executioner’s Song (79.14) by comparing/contrasting it with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
  • McKinley, Maggie. Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950–75. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. register An examination of violence, masculinity, and racial and ethnic tension in several American novelists, including Mailer.
  • McKinley, Maggie. Understanding Norman Mailer. University of South Carolina Press, 2017-11-06. register An introduction to Mailer’s work in an accessible volume. A solid primer on Mailer’s writings and concerns.
  • Mendelson, Edward. “Mythmaker: Norman Mailer.” Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers, 2015. register
  • Meredith, Robert. “The 45-Second Piss: A Left Critique of Norman Mailer and The Armies of the Night.” Modern Fiction Studies, 1971, 433–438. register Forceful and detailed critique.
  • Merrill, Robert. “The Armies of the Night: The Education of Norman Mailer.” Illinois Quarterly, 1974, 30–44. register Rpt: Bloom (1986). Sound analysis of point of view and structure in 68.8.
  • Merrill, Robert. “Norman Mailer’s Early Nonfiction: The Art of Self-Revelation.” Western Humanities Review, 1974, 1–12. register A shrewd study of Mailer’s emerging persona in the essays preceding The Armies of the Night (68.8).
  • Merrill, Robert. Norman Mailer Revisited. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1992. register Thoughtful examination of the formal structure of Mailer’s novels and nonfiction narratives; contains perhaps best analysis of The Executioner’s Song (79.14). Includes biographical chapter. Most comprehensive study to date.
  • Middlebrook, Jonathan. Mailer and the Times of His Time. Bay Books, 1976. register Extended personal essay on Mailer’s ties to American romantics, including a comic account of his first meeting with Mailer.
  • Mosser, Jason. The Participatory New Journalism of Michael Herr, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion: Creating New Reporting Styles. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2012. register
  • Muste, John M. “Norman Mailer and John Dos Passos: The Question of Influence.” Modern Fiction Studies, 1971, 361–374. register Raises serious doubts about the specific influence of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. on The Naked and the Dead (48.2).

N

  • Newlove, Donald. “Dinner at the Lowells.” Esquire, 1969, 128–129, 168, 170–178, 180, 184. register Lowell comments on his portrait in The Armies of the Night (68.8).
  • “Norman Mailer Issue.” New Orleans Review, 1973. register Contains three essays and an interview by Matthew Grace and Steve Roday. See 73.14.

O

  • Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Teleology of the Unconscious: The Art of Norman Mailer.” New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature, Vanguard Press, 1974, 170–192. register Discussion of Mailer’s dualisms in Why Are We In Vietnam? (67.15) and Of a Fire on the Moon (71.1) by a novelist who “disagree[s] with nearly every one of Mailer’s stated or implied ideas.”
  • Olster, Stacey. “The Transition to Post-Modernism: Norman Mailer and a New Frontier in Fiction.” Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction. 1989, Cambridge UP, 1989, 36–71. register Mailer is seen as a transitional figure between modernism and postmodernism; focus is on his writings of the 1960s.
  • Ostriker, Dane Proxpeals. “Norman Mailer and the Mystery Woman or, The Rape of the C—k.” Esquire, 1972-11, 122–125. register Pseudonymous attack in rhymed couplets on Mailer as male chauvinist.

P

  • Parker, Hershel. “Norman Mailer’s Revision of the Esquire Version of An American Dream: The Authority of ‘Built-in’ Intentionality.” Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction, Northwestern University Press, 1984, 181–212. register Argues that the magazine version of 65.7 is superior to the book version. See 83.6.
  • Pease, Donald E. “Citizen Vidal and Mailer’s America.” Raritan, 1992, 72–98. register Argues for Vidal as an ignored genius who prefigured the New Historicism and Mailer as anti-homosexual. Tendentious.
  • Pizer, Donald. “Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead.” Twentieth Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation, Southern Illinois University Press, 1982, 90–114. register Arguably the best essay on Mailer’s first novel (48.2).
  • Podhoretz, Norman. “Norman Mailer: The Embattled Vision.” Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing, Farrar, Strauss, 1964, 179–204. register Rpt: Lucid (1971). One of the first essays to examine Mailer’s shifting ideologies and idiosyncratic existentialism.
  • Poirier, Richard. “The Performing Self.” The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life, Oxford University Press, 1971, 86–111. register Prelude to his 1972 volume on Mailer.
  • Poirier, Richard. Norman Mailer. New York: Viking Press, 1972. register Rpt: Partial in Bloom (1986). Still considered to be most intelligent study of Mailer. Contains three chapters: on Mailer’s career, his relation to history, and his dualisms. Poirier’s Mailer is perhaps too postmodern, but Poirier is acute on Mailer’s endlessly modulating rhetoric, even if he is incredulous about Mailer’s cosmology.
  • Pratt, William C. “Mailer’s Barbary Shore and His Quest for a Radical Politics.” Illinois Quarterly, 1982, 48–56. register Ideological context for Mailer’s second novel (51.1). Excellent sources.

R

  • Radford, Jean. Norman Mailer: A Critical Study. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. register General survey of Mailer’s work from a feminist perspective. Her study is marred by its focus on ideology and lack of interest in stylistic nuance; contains a fine analyses of the Eitel-Esposito affair in The Deer Park (55.4).
  • Raleigh, John Henry. “History and Its Burdens: The Example of Norman Mailer.” Uses of Literature, Howaard University Press, 1973, 163–186. register Mailer’s historical sense, use of the small town and the “dynamic, orgiastic, explosive accelerating city.”
  • Ross, Mitchell. “Norman Mailer.” The Literary Politicians, Doubleday, 1978, 166–216. register Lacking notes and an index, this vicious diatribe is valuable to help understand the depth of anger among Mailer’s detractors. Ross is the Babe Ruth of Mailer revilers.
  • Rother, James. “Mailer’s ‘O’Shaugnessy Chronicle’: A Speculative Autopsy.” Critique, 1978, 21–39. register Contends that Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet caused Mailer to rethink his plans.

S

  • Schaub, Thomas Hill. “Rebel without a Cause: Mailer’s White Negro and Consensus Liberalism.” American Fiction in the Cold War, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, 137–152. register Attempt to deconstruct “The White Negro” (59.8a) into consensus liberalism.
  • Scheffler, Judith A. “The Prisoner as Creator in The Executioner's Song.” Midwest Quarterly, 1983. register Rpt: Bloom (1986). Focus on Gilmore’s self-definition.
  • Schickel, Richard. “Super Hero, Super Victim; The Politics of Illusion.” Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, Doubleday, 1985, 88–208. register Discussion of Mailer’s insights about Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway and John F. Kennedy.
  • Schrader, George Alfred. “Norman Mailer and the Despair of Defiance.” Yale Review, 1961-12, 267–280. register Rpt: Braudy (1972). Argues that hipsterism is not existentialism, but a violent variant of romanticism based on “libidinal urges.”
  • Schultz, Kevin. Buckley and Mailer: the Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015. register A critical/biographical history of the friendship between Mailer and William F. Buckley concentrating on their frequently oppositional writing, politics, and public personae in the sixties.
  • Schulz, Max F. “Norman Mailer’s Divine Comedy.” Radical Sophistication: Studies in Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists, Ohio University Press, 1974, 69–109. register Examination of Mailer’s novels, with only modest procrusteanism, in a Dantesque framework.
  • Schwenger, Peter. Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth Century Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, 24–36, 103–107. register Worthy exploration of Mailer’s rhetoric and obscenity.
  • Scott, Nathan A., Jr. “Norman Mailer—Our Whitman.” Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling, University of Notre Dame Press, 1973, 15–97. register In detailed readings, Scott makes the case that Mailer, like Whitman, is a “spokesperson for the American conscience.”
  • Seib, Kenneth A. “Mailer's March: The Epic Structure of The Armies of the Night.” Essays in Literature, 1974, 89–95. register Surprising parallels.
  • Shechner, Mark. “Memoirs of a Revolutionist.” After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary American Imagination, Indiana University Press, 1987, 159–179. register Examination of Mailer’s post-Marxist revolutionary impulses through Advertisements for Myself (59.13). Contains extensive discussion of influence of Wilhelm Reich and Robert Lindner. See 56.9.
  • Sheed, Wilfrid. “Norman Mailer: Genius or Nothing.” The Morning After: Selected Essays and Reviews, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, 9–17. register Tribute to Mailer as a weather vane: “As Mailer goes, so goes the nation.”
  • Sheets, Diana; Shaughnessy, Michael F. “An Interview with Diana Sheets: Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Two Leaders of ‘New Journalism’ or Writers Striving to Create the ‘Great American Novel’?” The Doubling: Those Influential Writers That Shape Our Contemporary Perceptions of Identity and Consciousness in the New Millennium, Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2016, 109–124. register
  • Shloss, Carol. “Norman Mailer and Combat Photography.” In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer, 1840-1940, Oxford University Press, 1987, 233–249. register Interesting consideration of the subjective-objective dilemma in The Naked and the Dead (48.2).
  • Shoemaker, Steve. “Norman Mailer’s ‘White Negro’: Historical Myth or Mythical History.” Twentieth Century Literature, 1991, 242–260. register Important reconsideration via the “New Historicism” of Stephen Greenblatt.
  • Silverstein, Howard. “Norman Mailer: The Family Romance and the Oedipal Fantasy.” American Imago, 1977, 277–286. register Triangular relationships in the early work.
  • Smolla, Rodney A. “Harlot’s Ghost and ‘JFK’: A Fictional Conversation with Norman Mailer, Oliver Stone, Earl Warren, and Hugo Black.” Suffolk University Law Review, 1992, 587–613. register Discussion of aesthetics and conspiracy.
  • Solotaroff, Robert. Down Mailer's Way. Urbana; London: University of Illinois Press, 1973. register Rpt: Partial in Lennon (1986). General survey containing a comprehensive and penetrating examination of Mailer’s existentialism and its debts to European philosophers. Contains one of the best critiques of “The White Negro” (59.8a) in print.
  • Staid, George. “Mailer and Miller.” Partisan Review, 1972, 616–624. register Thoughtful comparison.
  • Stark, John. “Barbary Shore: the Basis of Mailer's Best Work.” Modern Fiction Studies, 1971, 403–408. register The Hollingworths of Mailer and Nathaniel Hawthorne are considered.
  • Stone, Albert E. “Factual Fictions: Experiments in Autobiography by Norman Mailer, Frank Conroy, Lillian Hellman.” Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts: Versions of American Identity from Henry Adams to Nate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, 265–290, 340–342. register Valuable examination of The Armies of the Night (68.8) as part of the American autobiographical tradition.
  • “Studies of Norman Mailer.” Modern Fiction Studies, 1971, 345–463. register Special issue containing nine essays on Mailer’s writings, and Laura Adams’s pioneering checklist of criticism.
  • Styron, William. “Aftermath of ‘Aftermath’.” This Quiet Dust and Other Writings, Random House, 1982, 137–1422. register Styron empathizes with Mailer on the Jack Abbott affair. See 81.10.

T

  • Taylor, Gordon O. “Of Adams and Aquarius.” American Literature, 1974-03, 68–82. register Best essay on the influence of Henry Adams on Mailer’s nonfiction. See 81.16.
  • Toback, James. “Norman Mailer Today.” Commentary, 1967-10. register Examination of Mailer’s religious commitments, and the role of existential dread. Rpt: Mailer Review (2011), 413–432.
  • Trilling, Diana. “The Radical Moralism of Norman Mailer.” Claremont Essays, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964, 175–202. register Rpt: Lucid (1971), Braudy (1972). Best developed and most intelligent examination of Mailer’s work through Advertisements for Myself (59.13). Sensitive mediation between extremes of Mailer’s sensibility with praise for his “high political consciousness” and “moral affirmation.”

V

  • Vidal, Gore. “Women’s Liberation Meets Miller-Mailer-Manson Man.” Homage to Daniel Shays, Random House, 1972, 398–402. register Cause of Mailer’s fight with Vidal on the Dick Cavett television show in December 1971. See 77.7.
  • Vidal, Gore, editor. Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1980. register Vidal’s rivalry with Mailer is palpable here.
  • Vogelgesang, Sandy. The Long Dark Night of the Soul: The American Intellectual Left and the Vietnam War. New York: Harper and Row, 1974, 9–10, 131–133, 149–151, 178–179. register The powerful influence of The Armies of the Night (68.8) on the anti-Vietnam War movement.
  • Volpe, Edmund L. “James Jones—Norman Mailer.” Contemporary American Novelists, Southern Illinois University Press, 1964, 106–119. register Two existentialists compared.

W

  • Waldron, Randell H. “The Naked, the Dead and the Machine: A New Look at Mailer's First Novel.” PMLA, 1972, 271–277. register Rpt: Bloom (1986). The U.S. Army as the epitome of technology in The Naked and the Dead (48.2).
  • Weber, Ronald. The Literature of Fact: Literary Nonfiction in American Writing. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980, 81–88. register Examination of The Armies of the Night (68.8) and The Executioner’s Song (79.14) from an American Studies perspective.
  • Weinberg, Helen. “The Heroes of Norman Mailer's Novels.” The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Contemporary Fiction, Cornell UP, 1970, 108–140. register Emergence of Mailer’s “activist hero” from Barbary Shore (51.1) to An American Dream (65.7).
  • Wenke, Joseph. Mailer's America. Hanover, NH; London: University Press of New England for University of Connecticut, 2014, 198–203. register Wenke’s focus is almost completely thematic. Contains first extended treatment of Ancient Evenings (83.18).
  • Werge, Thomas. “An Apocalyptic Voyage: God, Satan, and the America Tradition in Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon.” Review of Politics, 1972-10, 108–128. register Rich discussion of Mailer’s “conviction of the essential religious drama of man’s experience,” focusing on 71.1 as a continuation of the vision of Herman Melville.
  • Whalen-Bridge, John. “Adamic Purity as Double-Agent in Harlot's Ghost.” Political Fiction and the American Self, University of Illinois Press, 1998, 103–130. register Subtle examination of “Mailer’s dual aptitude for representing and resisting American mythologies.”
  • Whalen-Bridge, John. Political Fiction and the American Self. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1998. register Subtle examination of Mailer's dual aptitude of representing and resisting American mythologies.
  • Whalen-Bridge, John, editor. Norman Mailer's Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle in the Forest. Springer, 2010. register Foreword by Jason Epstein. Afterword by Norris Church Mailer. Eleven essays on Mailer’s novels from Ancient Evenings (83.18) to The Castle in the Forest (07.10).
  • Widmer, Kingsley. “Several American Perplexes.” The Literary Rebel, Southern Illinois University Press, 1965, 175–198. register Comparison of Mailer and Paul Goodman.
  • Wilson, Andrew J. “Norman Mailer: An American Aesthetic.” Diss. U of Essex [U.K.], 2007. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2007. AAT C828492, 2007. register

Z

  • Zavarzadeh, Masud. The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976. register Attempts to prove, unconvincingly, that The Armies of the Night (68.8) has a “zero degree of interpretation” of reality.

141 items. Cite as: /bibliography/criticism
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