Norman Mailer: Works and Days/Bibliography/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.

M

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).