John W. Aldridge
American literary critic, professor at the University of Michigan, and close friend of Mailer's; he arranged for the excerpt "The Captain" from "A Calculus at Heaven" (44.1) to appear in The Artesian in the early 1940s, defined Mailer's postwar generation in After the Lost Generation (1951), championed An American Dream in a 1965 Life review, and became one of the most sustained critics of Mailer's fiction.
Aldridge was “a close friend of Mailer’s” in the Harvard years and later “taught at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor”. Lennon credits him, presumably, with arranging the publication of “The Captain” — an excerpt from “A Calculus at Heaven” — in The Artesian, a quarterly published in Ann Arbor, with Mailer, bearded, on the front cover.
Aldridge’s books — including After the Lost Generation (1951), In Search of Heresy (1956), and The Devil in the Fire (1972) — give extended treatment to Mailer, and he is a recurring name in later Mailer reception. The two grew especially close after After the Lost Generation appeared in 1951. In 1965 Aldridge wrote “The Big Comeback of Norman Mailer” (Life, 19 March 1965), the most prominent favorable notice of An American Dream; Mailer paid to reprint its heart in Partisan Review (65.9) to counter Elizabeth Hardwick‘s attack, and Aldridge expanded the piece in Time to Murder and Create (1966).
The friendship came full circle in 1985, when Mailer wrote the introduction to the Arbor House reissue of After the Lost Generation (85.14) — repaying the critic who, he said, had given his generation “the only sense of peerage one is ever going to get.” Stub; to be expanded when later Aldridge criticism of Mailer is catalogued.
Related pages
- A Calculus at Heaven | 1944 | An American Dream | A Small Public Notice by Norman Mailer | Introduction to After the Lost Generation (85.14)
- Harvard University | Elizabeth Hardwick