62.25

“Norman Mailer.” Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, edited by Max John Herzberg. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1962. For the “Comments” section of his entry, Mailer provided the following statement:

“ I think the writers who have meant the most to me in forming a style which could contain what I wished to say were, in approximate order of their chronological influence: Jeffrey Farnol, Rafael Sabatini, James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, André Malraux, William Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Oswald Spengler, Mikhail Sholokhov, E. M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Stendhal, Marx, Trotsky, James Jones, Zola, the Marquis de Sade, Proust, Gide, Sartre, William Burroughs. Among the playwrights Shaw, O’Neill, Odets, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Beckett, and Ionesco. ”