Introduction to After the Lost Generation
Mailer's introduction to the 1985 Arbor House reissue of John W. Aldridge's After the Lost Generation (1951), the critical study that gave Mailer's postwar generation its first collective definition; a tribute to Aldridge's authority as a critic and a friend.
Mailer’s introduction to the 1985 Arbor House reissue of John W. Aldridge‘s After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars (xvii–xxii). Aldridge’s book, first published by McGraw-Hill in 1951, had given Mailer’s postwar generation its first “cohesive sense of identity” — and Mailer his first important critical notice — and the two men became lifelong friends.
The introduction is at once a tribute and an argument. Mailer opens on the modern “need of documentary evidence to certify one is what one is supposed to be” — “we are all Jews to a degree … three-quarters amputated from the past” — and praises Aldridge for doing “a great deal more than assign terms”: he gave young writers “the only sense of peerage one is ever going to get.” Mailer regrets that later cohorts (Stone, DeLillo, Crews, Pynchon; then Phillips, Beattie, Mason, Carver) never received “a collective comparative work by a critic of Aldridge’s stature.” He prizes in Aldridge “the literary critic’s most indispensable first gift: authority” — “It was usually awful what he said, but right” — and the rare capacity to understand “our working problems … from within our creative box rather than outside it.” The piece closes on the long shadow of the Holocaust and of nuclear dread over the writing of his generation, with Aldridge “one of the few lights on the route through the interminable swamp.”
A full transcription, cleared under the Project Mailer estate grant, is held at full text.