The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Reflections: Difference between revisions

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The seeds of an emphasis on [[Norman Mailer]] and Ernest Hemingway in [[The Mailer Review]] have been present for a long time. I have been teaching and writing about Ernest Hemingway for more than three decades and powerful connections between him and Norman Mailer are obvious to anyone versed in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway was one of a small group of American writers to dominate the first half of the last century. Mailer belongs to a select handful of writers who changed the literary landscape of the second half of the past century. Further, Mailer was a public intellectual, a prolific biographer, and a social and political chronicler, covering six sets of political conventions and writing about every president from Franklin Delano Roosevelt on.
The seeds of an emphasis on [[Norman Mailer]] and Ernest Hemingway in ''[[The Mailer Review]]'' have been present for a long time. I have been teaching and writing about Ernest Hemingway for more than three decades and powerful connections between him and Norman Mailer are obvious to anyone versed in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway was one of a small group of American writers to dominate the first half of the last century. Mailer belongs to a select handful of writers who changed the literary landscape of the second half of the past century. Further, Mailer was a public intellectual, a prolific biographer, and a social and political chronicler, covering six sets of political conventions and writing about every president from Franklin Delano Roosevelt on.


Both artists, from their beginnings, were intensely interested in fundamental human struggles: life and death, war and peace, the power and mysteries of sex, love and pain, joy and depression, consciousness of the void and its brief respites, human entropy, and the infinite enigmas of life. Both men were cultural iconoclasts, rabidly interested in “manly” sports, especially boxing and bullfighting. Both men loved French culture, lived in Paris, visited it often, knew the French novel, and were revered by the French.
Both artists, from their beginnings, were intensely interested in fundamental human struggles: life and death, war and peace, the power and mysteries of sex, love and pain, joy and depression, consciousness of the void and its brief respites, human entropy, and the infinite enigmas of life. Both men were cultural iconoclasts, rabidly interested in “manly” sports, especially boxing and bullfighting. Both men loved French culture, lived in Paris, visited it often, knew the French novel, and were revered by the French.