The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998–2008

From Project Mailer

"The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people,"

Mailer wrote just under half a century ago (Advertisements 384), but the majority of serious readers today would not pick up Mailer by that handle. Perhaps it is the business of Mailer scholarship, first and foremost, to ask whether we should. The inquiry would, at its fullest, have implications that extend far beyond Mailer scholarship, which is a way of saying that Mailer is not (or in a just world would not be!) merely of interest to specialists.