NORMAN MAILER, LITERARY HUSTLER

“Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer was, after J.D. Salinger, postwar America’s most famous writer of literary fiction. Today Mailer’s name no longer figures other than sporadically on lists of important postwar writers. It is instructive to recall that in 1959, he counted himself among ‘the strong talents of my generation, those few of us who have wide minds in a narrow overdeveloped time.’ This brash claim was typical of Mailer, and he would have expected nothing less six years after his death than the publication of two or three thousand-page biographies…”