Mailer, Norman
Mailer's autobiographical entry for Twentieth Century Authors: First Supplement (ed. Stanley J. Kunitz) — written in December 1952 — containing several of his most-quoted early statements of literary purpose.
“Mailer, Norman.” In Twentieth Century Authors: First Supplement, edited by Stanley J. Kunitz, 628–29. New York: H.W. Wilson.
An autobiographical entry that Mailer wrote in December 1952. He reflects on the formative “external importance” of his Brooklyn boyhood and his Harvard culture in making him want to write, and offers two oft-quoted statements of method and ambition:
I have long suffered from an inability to combine the best of two quite separate attitudes about the writing of novels; briefly, the romantic and the realist.
[The] virtue I should most like to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing … to serve as the gadfly to complacency, institutions, and the dead weight of public taste.