Norman Mailer: Works and Days/Bibliography/Cultural Backgrounds

Overview

First Editions

Key Critical Texts

Bibliographies

Biographies

Criticism

Cultural Backgrounds

This section contains many items that arguably could be better placed with the critical materials. Their location is an attempt to identify key references to the worlds (and demimondes) Mailer has moved in, sometimes with reference to him, sometimes not. This section is far from exhaustive and is more a reflection of our Mailer library than any comprehensive plan.

A–B

• Aldridge, John W. (1972). The Devil in the Fire: Retrospective Essays on American Literature and Culture, 1951-1971. New York: Harper's Magazine Press. Historical chronicle of major literary developments and critiques of the most significant post-World War II writers, including Mailer.
• Anderson, Elliott; Kinzie, Mary (1978). The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History. Yonkers, NY: Pushcart Press. Forty-two chapters on the great literary magazines and Peter Martin's detailed, annotated bibliography of 85 of them, including Big Table, Evergreen Review, Fuck You, New American Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review and Story. Definitive.
• Beach, Joseph Warren (1941). American Fiction: 1920-1940. New York: Macmillan. Classic study of eight writers—John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, John P. Marquand, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, James T. Farrell and John Steinbeck—which Mailer “devoured” in college, as he explains in “Last Advertisement for Myself before the Way Out” in 59.13.
• Bloom, Alexander (1986). Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World. New York: Oxford University Press. Standard work on the subject.
• Bowers, John (1971). The Colony. New York: E. P. Dutton. Memoir of James Jones’s writing colony in Illinois, including Mailer’s 1954 visit.
• Bradbury, Malcolm (1992). The Modern American Novel (Revised ed.). New York: Viking. Balanced and insightful overview of the American novel from the 1890s to the 1990s.
• Broyard, Anatole (1996). Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir. New York: Crown. The Village in the late 1940s.
• Burgess, Anthony (1984). 99 Novels: The Best in English since 1939. New York: Summit Books. The Naked and the Dead (48.2) and Ancient Evenings (83.18) are included.

C–F

• Cawelti, John G. (1977). "The Writer as a Celebrity: Some Aspects of American Literature as Popular Culture". Studies in American Fiction. 5 (spring): 161–174. Careful, detached discussion of celebrity and fame in the careers of nineteenth and twentieth century American writers, including Poe, James, Hemingway and Mailer.
• Charters, Ann, ed. (1992). The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Viking Penguin. Perhaps the best collection of the work of the Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes and many others. Mailer’s “The White Negro” (57.1) is included.
• Cox, James M. (1971). "Autobiography and America". In Miller, J. Hillis. Aspects of America: Selected Papers from the English Institute. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 143–172. Lucid discussion of the forebears of Mailer and other 1960s autobiographical-political writers: Ben Franklin, Henry David Thoreau and Henry Adams.
• De Grazia, Edward (1992). Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. New York: Random House. Comprehensive account of the century-long struggle against censorship. See 92.12.
• Dickstein, Morris (1977). Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties. New York: Basic Books. Mailer is a touchstone in this major cultural history.
• Eisinger, Chester E. (1963). Fiction of the Forties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Survey of the emotional temper of the decade with extended discussions of Mailer, Budd Schulberg, Irwin Shaw, John Dos Passos, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Lionel Trilling and others.
• Feldman, Gene; Gartenberg, Marx, eds. (1958). The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press. First anthology of the Beat writers and first to reprint “The White Negro” (57.1).
• Fiedler, Leslie A. (1964). Waiting for the End. New York: Stein and Day. Essays on the shift in the U.S. from “a whiskey culture to a drug culture.”
• Frankfort, Ellen (1976). The Voice: Life at "The Village Voice". New York: William Morrow. Account of the newspaper’s movement away from its more radical origins. See 56.1–56.17.

G–H

• Geismar, Maxwell (1958). American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity. New York: Hill and Wang. Essays on American fiction at mid-century, from Theodore Dreiser and William Faulkner to Mailer, James Jones and William Styron. See 48.3.
• Girgus, Sam B. (1984). The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Historical overview of Jewish writers and American culture, with close readings; Mailer and Abraham Cahan are the key figures.
• Gitlin, Todd (1987). The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam. Benchmark examination of the New Left.
• Green, Martin (1972). "Norman Mailer and the City of New York: Faustian Radicalism". Cities of Light and Sons of the Morning: A Cultural Psychology for an Age of Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown. pp. 58–89. Green’s Mailer is a Jewish Faust, epitome of 1960s New York. Rpt: Partial in Lennon (1986).
• Hamill, Pete (1994). A Drinking Life. Boston: Little, Brown. Crisp memoir of New York in the 1950s and 1960s, with asides on Mailer.
• Hayes, Harold, ed. (1969). Smiling through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties. New York: McCall. From the pages of the decade’s indispensable magazine, the best collection on the 1960s. Two of Mailer’s most important pieces (60.9 and 63.8) from the period are included.
• Hellman, John (1986). American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: Columbia University Press. Examination of the reflection of the Vietnam War in American history, literature, film and popular culture. Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? (67.15) is discussed.
• Hoffman, Abbie (1989). Simon, Daniel; Hoffman, Abbie, eds. The Best of Abbie Hoffman. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Mailer provided an introduction to this collection of the writings of the mad genius of the counterculture. See 80.26.
• Hoffman, Daniel, ed. (1979). Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Critical survey of the most important American writing from the end of World War II through the 1970s.
• Holmes, John Clellon (1988). Passionate Opinions: The Cultural Essays. Fayetteville, AK: University of Arkansas Press. Essays on the Beat writers by their unofficial scribe.

J–L

• Johnson, Michael L. (1971). The New Journalism: The Underground Press, the Artists of Nonfiction, and Changes in the Established Media. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Rpt: Partial in Adams (1974). Pioneering study.
• Jones, Howard Mumford; Ludwig, Richard M. (1972). Guide to American Literature and Its Backgrounds since 1890 (4th ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Select bibliography and outline of American literature in its intellectual, social and cultural contexts.
• Jones, Peter G. (1976). War and the Novelist: Appraising the American War Novel. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Comprehensive study of World War II novels, including those by Mailer, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, James Gould Cozzens and Kurt Vonnegut.
• Jumonville, Neil (1991). Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. The debates and dilemmas of the cultural elites. Fine opening chapter on the 1949 Waldorf conference.
• Klein, Holger, ed. (1984). The Second World War in Fiction. London: Macmillan. Contains chapters on the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union and Japan. The Naked and the Dead (48.2) is given careful analysis, especially the “uneasy” liberalism of Lt. Hearn.
• Klein, Marcus, ed. (1969). The American Novel since World War II. New York: Fawcett. One of the best collections on this topic to date. Includes Mailer’s 1965 address to the Modern Language Association. See 66.5.
• Kazin, Alfred (1973). Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Boston: Little, Brown. Major study by our finest postwar critic.
• — (1962). Contemporaries. Boston: Little, Brown. Rich collection of Kazin’s reviews and essays from the 1940s through the early 1960s including his review of Advertisements for Myself (59.13).
• Kerrane, Kevin; Yagoda, Ben, eds. (1997). The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism. New York: Scribner's. Most comprehensive collection of its kind, extending from Daniel Defoe and Jack London through Mailer, Michael Herr and Rosemary Mahoney.
• Lasch, Christopher (1965). The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type. New York: Random House. The roots of American radicalism and a critique of “the isolation of American intellectuals, as a class, from the main currents of American life.” Mailer is the chief whipping boy.
• Lois, George (1996). Covering the 60s: George Lois, the “Esquire” Era. New York: Monacelli Press. Full reproduction of 70 of George Lois’s covers for Esquire in the 1960s and 1970s, with commentary. See 71.27.

M–N

• Millett, Kate (2016) [1970]. "Norman Mailer". Sexual Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 314–335. Feminist critique of Mailer, D.H. Lawrence, Sigmund Freud, Henry Miller and others. Mailer responded in The Prisoner of Sex (71.20).