Norman Mailer in Context

Norman Mailer in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley (Cambridge University Press, 2021), in the Literature in Context series — a collection of scholarly essays situating Mailer's work within the literary, critical, theoretical, cultural, and historical frameworks of twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. A secondary, edited essay collection recorded with kind `about`.

Norman Mailer in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2021) — cover

Maggie McKinley, ed. Norman Mailer in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 416 pp., hardcover. ISBN 978-1-108-47766-6. Literature in Context series.

A collection of essays that “offers new insight into the breadth of contexts that inform Norman Mailer’s body of work… examining important literary, critical, theoretical, cultural, and historical frameworks for Mailer’s writing”. The volume traces Mailer’s literary influences, his contributions across genres, his participation in American politics, the philosophical, religious, and gendered contexts of his work, and “the iconic American figures he profiled,” concluding with reflections on his literary and cultural legacy and his advocacy for literary freedom. Reviewing it in Choice, B. Diemert noted that the book “emphasizes the work over the person, so readers will gain a fresh understanding of Mailer’s writing… Recommended”.

Where McKinley’s Understanding Norman Mailer (2017) is a single-author career survey, this is the complementary multi-author contextual companion — the kind of “in context” framing that maps closely onto this project’s own apparatus of People, Places, Concepts, and tags.

In her introduction, McKinley argues that for all Mailer’s chameleon reinventions, certain preoccupations recur — “existentialism, totalitarianism, democracy, technology, masculinity, and duality” — alongside a gallery of figures he profiled for decades: “Pablo Picasso, John F. Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Gary Gilmore, Lee Harvey Oswald, Adolf Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, and Jesus.” The “lynchpin around which all of these varying interests turned,” she writes, “is America” (McKinley 2021, Introduction). The volume deliberately reaches past “a sensationalized and dramatic tabloid tale” toward the contexts that produced the work.

Contents and contributors

The book gathers an introduction, some twenty-eight chapters, and an afterword by roughly two dozen scholars, organized along the contextual arc the publisher describes — literary influences; contributions across genres; the political sphere; philosophical, religious, and gendered contexts; the iconic figures Mailer profiled; and his legacy. Representative chapters and their authors include “Mailer and Hemingway” (Linda Wagner-Martin), “New Journalism” (Jason Mosser), “The Novel” (Peter Balbert), “Criticism” (Phillip Sipiora), “Film” (Justin Bozung), “JFK and Political Heroism” (J. Michael Lennon), “Totalitarianism” (Erin Mercer), “The Hipster” (Raj Chandarlapaty — see Hipster), “Existentialism and Manichaeism” (Victor Peppard), “Judaism” (Mashey Bernstein), “Masculinity” (Brad Congdon), “Marilyn Monroe” (Carl Rollyson), “Mailer Studies in the Twenty-First Century” (Robert J. Begiebing), and “Political Resonance” (Gerald R. Lucas, editor of Project Mailer and editor of this digital edition). McKinley herself contributes the Introduction, the chapter “Violence,” and the closing “Afterword: Mailer after #MeToo” (McKinley 2021).

Several contributors recur across this project’s apparatus and holdings: J. Michael Lennon (founding editor), Jason Mosser and Gerald R. Lucas (co-editors of this site’s full-text White Negro), Robert J. Begiebing (author of Norman Mailer at 100), and Mashey Bernstein (whom David Denby quotes on Mailer’s Judaism in Eminent Jews).

The editor

Maggie McKinley, associate professor of English at Harper College, edited the volume; see Maggie McKinley. By 2021 she had already published the single-author study Understanding Norman Mailer (2017), had become president of the Norman Mailer Society (she was its vice president in 2017), and was also program director of the Philip Roth Society (McKinley 2021). She would contribute a jacket note to J. Michael Lennon‘s Mailer’s Last Days the following year.

A note on this entry

A secondary, edited essay collection — a book about Mailer — recorded in the bibliography with kind about (the edited kind is reserved for volumes Mailer himself edited; McKinley’s editorship is noted in the Author(s) field as “ed.”). Form collection. Like other post-2016 additions it carries no legacy-id (see About this project).

Dating note: the captured Amazon listing left the “Publication date” field blank. The date recorded here, 26 August 2021, follows Cambridge University Press’s publication record (and the source filename); should the press’s own catalog give a different day, the id keeps its form and a previous-id alias is added. The only price observed was a $91.11 (Amazon, new) hardcover offer, consistent with a Cambridge academic list price; the price field is left blank pending confirmation.