The Mailer Review/Volume 8, 2014/Norman Mailer and the Oxford English Dictionary: Difference between revisions

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Norman Mailer and the ''Oxford English Dictionary''}}

{{MR08}}

Norman Mailer ranks among the most copiously productive, widely read, critically acclaimed, vehemently vilified, and highly controversial American writers of the post-WWII era. As a public intellectual and celebrity spokesman for left-wing causes like the Vietnam War, Mailer helped define and participate in the counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s, for which his essay “The White Negro” is a seminal historical, cultural, and linguistic source. One way to evaluate the impact of writers on their lives and times is to determine the number of citations they receive in the ''Oxford English Dictionary''. Authors are chosen for the ''OED'' reading program based on their presentation of cross-varieties of English and interesting vocabulary, particularly new coinages. Moreover, as Julie Coleman writes, ''OED'' citations tell us much, not only about “the creativity and influence of authors and works, but also about wider cultural history”{{sfn|Coleman|2012|p=1}} Based on the illustrative quotations attributed to him in the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (2nd ed.), 196 matches as of this date, Mailer, the person and the author, emerges as one of the definitive sources for lexical coinages of his milieu.