In the Ring with Mailer
James Marcus's centennial omnibus review in the TLS (17 February 2023), surveying Mailer's career through his boxing-as-art conceit while weighing three centenary books — Bradford's Tough Guy, Lennon's Mailer's Last Days, and Begiebing's Norman Mailer at 100. An about-Mailer clipping.
James Marcus. “In the Ring with Mailer.” The Times Literary Supplement, 17 February 2023.
A centennial omnibus review built on Mailer’s boxing-as-art conceit. Marcus runs the career — the fame of The Naked and the Dead, the “sophomore slump,” the Advertisements turn, the New Journalism of The Armies of the Night — while weighing three centenary books: Richard Bradford’s debunking Tough Guy, Lennon’s Mailer’s Last Days, and Begiebing’s Norman Mailer at 100. He neither minimizes the 1960 stabbing of Adele Morales nor spares the “hipster poppycock” of “The White Negro”, but closes on Mailer “buried in his boxing regalia — a fighter to the end.”
Related pages
- Mailer's Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature | Norman Mailer at 100: Conversations, Correlations, Confrontations | The Naked and the Dead | James Marcus | About this project