The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer
Barry H. Leeds's 1969 study, the first book on Mailer: a chapter on each of the five novels, on the poems, on the three miscellanies, and on The Armies of the Night with Miami and the Siege of Chicago, arguing a line of development in narrative voice and in the plight of the individual in American society from The Naked and the Dead to The Armies of the Night. Reproduced in full by permission of the Leeds estate.
The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer. By Barry H. Leeds. New York: New York University Press; London: University of London Press, 1969.
The first book-length study of Mailer, published in the year The Armies of the Night took the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Leeds, who had written his Ohio University dissertation on Mailer, organizes the book around a thesis of development: that between The Naked and the Dead (1948) and The Armies of the Night (1968) two elements of the work, the narrative voice and the concern with social ills and the plight of the individual, grow steadily in sophistication and control. The early fiction is read as a legacy of the social criticism of the thirties, of Dos Passos, Farrell, and Steinbeck, modified by the American existentialism Mailer set out in “The White Negro”; The Naked and the Dead and An American Dream get the fullest attention as the two poles of that development, despair at the plight of the individual giving way to a carefully qualified hope. The Armies of the Night is read last, as the convergence of three lines: the fiction, the earlier nonfiction, and the public image.
After a biographical outline and an introduction, the chapters take the five novels in order, then the verse, the three miscellanies, and the two 1968 narratives: The Naked and the Dead; Barbary Shore; The Deer Park; An American Dream; Why Are We in Vietnam?; Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters); Advertisements for Myself, The Presidential Papers, and Cannibals and Christians; and The Armies of the Night with Miami and the Siege of Chicago. A selected bibliography closes the book. It remains valuable for its analysis of An American Dream and for its early consideration of The Armies of the Night and of Deaths for the Ladies. Rpt: part of the study in Adams (1974).
The text is reproduced here complete, with the permission of the estate of Barry H. Leeds, from the digital edition prepared for Project Mailer; it may also be downloaded as an EPUB.
Related pages
- Barry H. Leeds | 1969
- The Naked and the Dead | Barbary Shore | The Deer Park | An American Dream | Why Are We in Vietnam?
- Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters) | Advertisements for Myself | The Presidential Papers | Cannibals and Christians
- The Armies of the Night | Miami and the Siege of Chicago