Death of a Literary Lion

Norman Mailer, who died Saturday morning, said it himself: In his younger days, "fiction was everything. The novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway ... I don't think the same thing can be said anymore." His generation is almost gone now. Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, James Jones, Joseph Heller, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut -- the young turks who came out of World War II to challenge Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck -- are all dead. Of that generation of American literary titans, those figures whose new works used to inspire intense scrutiny, only John Updike, Philip Roth and J.D. Salinger -- with Updike and Roth a half-generation younger, and the long-silent Salinger preferring the smaller stage of the short story -- remain. It's no slight against E.L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, John Irving, Toni Morrison and the other great elder statesmen and -women of today to feel that the literary world is diminished nowadays -- there are so many books, yet so little attention. And with the possible exception of Roth, with his trilogy of "American Pastoral," "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain," nobody's attempting the so-called Great American Novel. Few writers try anything so expansive anymore. (Among recent works, perhaps Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay" or Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" come closest.) Indeed, there is a bittersweet symbolism in the timing of Mailer's death. He was a member of the print generation, when the pages of newspapers and magazines were the arena for big ideas and raging arguments, and he died on a Saturday morning, assuring himself the front page of the that great novel-sized bargain, the Sunday New York Times. (He would have loved that.)

'"I decided the only explanation is that God and the Devil are very attentive to people at the summit. I don't know if they stir much in the average man's daily stew, no great sport for spooks, I would suppose, in a ranch house, but do you expect God or the Devil left Lenin and Hitler and Churchill alone? No. They bid
for favors and exact revenge. That's why men with power sometimes act so silly."' (from An American Dream, 1965)

Quotes:

"I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop."

"There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will."

Further reading

Norman Mailer, by Michael K. Glenday. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer, by Nigel Leigh. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.Critical Essays on Norman Mailer, edited by J.Michael Lennon: Boston, G.K.Hall and Co., 1986.Norman Mailer, by Richard Poirier, New York: Viking,1972. One of the best studies of Mailer's writing, tracking his career through the early Eighties.Norman Mailer, by Richard Jackson Foster, University of Minnesota Press, 1968.The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer, by Barry H. Leeds, New York University Press,1969.Norman Mailer, by Robert Merrill, Twayne, 1978.Mailer: His Life and Times, edited by Peter Manso, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Highly readable "oral" biography of Mailer created by cross-cutting interviews with friends, enemies, acquaintances, relatives, wives of Mailer and Mailer himself.Conversations with Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1988.The Portable Beat Reader, edited by Ann Charters, Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk).

Websites:

http://edition.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/blogs/marquee/2007/11/death-of-literary-lion.html

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/nmailer.htm