Norman Mailer’s ego was infamously and comically pungent. Like Woody Allen’s neurosis or Warren Beatty’s virility, for decades it was a basic, popularly accepted fact of American public life – a phenomenon arguably better known than any of his books.
For a good part of the previous century, Norman Mailer’s ego was a source of punchlines, parodies and caricatures, and often the subject of his own writing. “One characteristic of the very ambitious writer is that he becomes a theoretician of his own work,” once wrote one of Mailer’s sharper critics, Richard Poirier. “In being so, he manages to set the terms for the criticism subsequently written about him … [Mailer’s] self-explanations and assessments are abundant to a fault.”