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{{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John |last1=Oon |first1=Angela |abstract=A survey of the status of Mailer Studies over the past ten years with a detailed analysis of strategic articles, dissertations, and books. |url=https://prmlr.us/mr03wha}}
{{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John |last1=Oon |first1=Angela |abstract=A survey of the status of Mailer Studies over the past ten years with a detailed analysis of strategic articles, dissertations, and books. |note=I thank the highly able Edwina Quek, Jane Wong, Low Wai Yee, and Angela Oon for their impressive research skills, nor could I have made my deadline without the much-needed help of Helena Whalen-Bridge. |url=https://prmlr.us/mr03wha}}


{{dc|dc=“T|he 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,{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=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.
{{dc|dc=“T|he 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,{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=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.
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On November 9—11, 2006, the Center hosted its biennale Fleur Cowles Flair Symposium, ''The Sense of Our Time: Norman Mailer and America in Conflict''. The panelists included Norman Mailer himself, J. Michael Lennon, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Oshinsky. There was also an exhibition held in conjunction with the Symposium—“Norman Mailer Takes On America”—which was described by Lennon as “by far the most impressive exhibition of the life and work of Norman Mailer ever mounted.” [https://web.archive.org/web/20080122022501/http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition/2006/fall/norman_mailer.html Lennon gave an interview with the Center].{{efn|[As is the case with many URLs in print, the links included by the authors are dead as of the date of remediation, {{date|July 2021}}. Therefore, those that have been archived or just relocated are linked, but dead URLs have been removed. —Ed.]}} Also, an interview with Norman Mailer, his son John Buffalo Mailer and sister Barbara Mailer Wasserman was conducted by Ransom Center’s Curator of Academic Affairs, Robert Fulton, when the family came for the Symposium. The [https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/search/sound/recordings/?collNo=MS-02643 audio clips] from the interview and its transcript can be found at the Center. Among other questions, Fulton asked the following:  
On November 9—11, 2006, the Center hosted its biennale Fleur Cowles Flair Symposium, ''The Sense of Our Time: Norman Mailer and America in Conflict''. The panelists included Norman Mailer himself, J. Michael Lennon, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Oshinsky. There was also an exhibition held in conjunction with the Symposium—“Norman Mailer Takes On America”—which was described by Lennon as “by far the most impressive exhibition of the life and work of Norman Mailer ever mounted.” [https://web.archive.org/web/20080122022501/http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition/2006/fall/norman_mailer.html Lennon gave an interview with the Center].{{efn|[As is the case with many URLs in print, the links included by the authors are dead as of the date of remediation, {{date|July 2021}}. Therefore, those that have been archived or just relocated are linked, but dead URLs have been removed. —Ed.]}} Also, an interview with Norman Mailer, his son John Buffalo Mailer and sister Barbara Mailer Wasserman was conducted by Ransom Center’s Curator of Academic Affairs, Robert Fulton, when the family came for the Symposium. The [https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/search/sound/recordings/?collNo=MS-02643 audio clips] from the interview and its transcript can be found at the Center. Among other questions, Fulton asked the following:  


{{quote|'''Robert Fulton:''' You as Norman Mailer have various identities—you are Norman Mailer the writer, then when you speak about yourself as Norman or Mailer in your writings in sort of the third person, and then you’re Norman Mailer the reader. Which one of those is stronger for you?
{{quote|'''Robert Fulton''': You as Norman Mailer have various identities—you are Norman Mailer the writer, then when you speak about yourself as Norman or Mailer in your writings in sort of the third person, and then you’re Norman Mailer the reader. Which one of those is stronger for you?


'''Norman Mailer:''' It almost depends on my mood. If I’m reading aloud, I’ll be the person I’m pretending to be, at that point I’ll be Norman Mailer the reader. I do think we have a certain separation from ourselves. In other words, when I’m talking about myself at the age of 28, and I’m saying “Norman”—he exists in my mind almost like a relative. In other words I don’t feel the individual umbilical cord stretching right out to him so I can yank on him and bring him in. He’s there; he is what he was and so on. And I think that’s true of all of us. We bear an odd relation to our own past that is beyond my powers to explore, but they may get into that sort of thing.}}
'''Norman Mailer''': It almost depends on my mood. If I’m reading aloud, I’ll be the person I’m pretending to be, at that point I’ll be Norman Mailer the reader. I do think we have a certain separation from ourselves. In other words, when I’m talking about myself at the age of 28, and I’m saying “Norman”—he exists in my mind almost like a relative. In other words I don’t feel the individual umbilical cord stretching right out to him so I can yank on him and bring him in. He’s there; he is what he was and so on. And I think that’s true of all of us. We bear an odd relation to our own past that is beyond my powers to explore, but they may get into that sort of thing.}}


The umbilical cord stretching endlessly between imagination and reality—Mailer’s musings, his more polished prose, and the anecdotes we now think of as “his life” flow one into the other, defeating our attempts at anything like narratological precision.
The umbilical cord stretching endlessly between imagination and reality—Mailer’s musings, his more polished prose, and the anecdotes we now think of as “his life” flow one into the other, defeating our attempts at anything like narratological precision.
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===III. Mailer And His Others: The Personification Of ''Agon?''===
===III. Mailer And His Others: The Personification Of ''Agon?''===
Taking all the articles written about Mailer in the last ten years in hand, one could select a set of which compare Mailer to another writer, usually in not very surprising ways, but the interesting tendency is for critics to begin to see Mailer less in terms of ''agon'' and more in terms of affiliation. Mailer has been
Taking all the articles written about Mailer in the last ten years in hand, one could select a set of which compare Mailer to another writer, usually in not very surprising ways, but the interesting tendency is for critics to begin to see Mailer less in terms of ''agon'' and more in terms of affiliation. Mailer has been often understood as a rival of other writers, and this perspective is a large aspect of his own self creation. His {{date|1959}} article, “Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” was perhaps Mailer’s Rubicon: his appraisals of James Jones, William Styron, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, and so forth made it clear that Mailer was not destined to become a literary politician. Mailer wrote in ''The Armies of the Night'' that he thought of himself as a counter-puncher, and his literary feuds and rivalries, including spats and major feuds with writers such as James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, as well as his battles with larger movements such as his engagement with feminism that led to ''The Prisoner of Sex'', reveal the essential truth of Richard Poirier’s claim that Mailer never stopped being a war novelist. If Mailer has always had reliable Orwellian intuitions about the ways in which American political forces drift toward war to enhance an internal organization rather than ward off external threat, then perhaps it could be said it takes one to know one. Mailer writes on the imagination at war and Mailer readers look for the mythical “good war.” Mailer often was not quite on the right side in the Manichean battle between the Devil and the Lord.
often understood as a rival of other writers, and this perspective is a large aspect of his own self creation. His 1959 article, “Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” was perhaps Mailer’s Rubicon: his appraisals of James Jones, William Styron, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, and so forth made it clear that Mailer was not destined to become a literary politician. Mailer wrote in ''The Armies of the Night'' that he thought of himself as a counter-puncher, and his literary feuds and rivalries, including spats and major feuds with writers such as James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, as well as his battles with larger movements such as his engagement with feminism that led to ''The Prisoner of Sex'', reveal the essential truth of Richard Poirier’s claim that Mailer never stopped being a war novelist. If Mailer has always had reliable Orwellian intuitions about the ways in which American political forces drift toward war to enhance an internal organization rather than ward off external threat, then perhaps it could be said it
takes one to know one. Mailer writes on the imagination at war and Mailer readers look for the mythical “good war.” Mailer often was not quite on the right side in the Manichean battle between the Devil and the Lord.


Mailer and Coover, for example, help us see homophobia as a function of cold war hegemony in “Crises of Masculinity: Homosexual Desire and Homosexual Panic in the Critical ColdWar Narratives of Mailer and Coover”
Mailer and Coover, for example, help us see homophobia as a function of cold war hegemony in “Crises of Masculinity: Homosexual Desire and Homosexual Panic in the Critical ColdWar Narratives of Mailer and Coover” by Michael Snyder. For Snyder, Mailer’s ''An American Dream'' and ''Why are We in Vietnam?'', like Coover’s ''The Public Burning'', “critique the way homosexuality functions to consolidate patriarchal power,”{{sfn|Snyder|2007|p=250}} but Mailer is a little more of the bad cop to Robert Coover’s good cop, since Mailer’s homophobia is compared to Coover’s “use of subversive Bakhtinian carnival laughter,” which “presents a more devastating, comprehensive critique of cold war rhetoric” than do texts by Mailer.{{sfn|Snyder|2007|p=250}}
by Michael Snyder. For Snyder,Mailer’s ''An American Dream'' and ''Why are We in Vietnam?'', like Coover’s ''The Public Burning'', “critique the way homosexuality functions to consolidate patriarchal power” (250), but Mailer is a little more of the bad cop to Robert Coover’s good cop, since Mailer’s homophobia is compared to Coover’s “use of subversive Bakhtinian carnival laughter,” which “presents a more devastating, comprehensive critique of cold war rhetoric” than do texts by Mailer (250).


Some of the “Mailer vs. X” merely recycle an idea, using the staged fight to expand naught into naught-much-more. Michael Macilwee’s article “Saul Bellow and Normal Mailer” is somewhat reminiscent of earlier articles we have seen on these two writers. There have been two Vidal vs. Mailer articles during this period, one by Michael Mewshaw, appearing in 2002, “Vidal and Mailer,” and Heather Nelson’s “Jack’s Ghost: Reappearances of John F. Kennedy in the Work of Gore Vidal and Normal Mailer” in ''American Studies International''. Neither one mentions Donald Pease’s Mailer/Vidal comparison from 1992, “Citizen Vidal and Mailer’s America,” for example.
Some of the “Mailer vs. X” merely recycle an idea, using the staged fight to expand naught into naught-much-more. Michael Macilwee’s article “Saul Bellow and Normal Mailer” is somewhat reminiscent of earlier articles we have seen on these two writers. There have been two Vidal vs. Mailer articles during this period, one by Michael Mewshaw, appearing in {{date|2002}}, “Vidal and Mailer,” and Heather Nelson’s “Jack’s Ghost: Reappearances of John F. Kennedy in the Work of Gore Vidal and Normal Mailer” in ''American Studies International''. Neither one mentions Donald Pease’s Mailer/Vidal comparison from {{date|1992}}, “Citizen Vidal and Mailer’s America,” for example.


Mewshaw informs us, after recycling the Mailer/Vidal feud one more time, that “Vidal gave no sign of being bothered by the noise and the pollution,” that a “servant, Indian or Sri Lankan, brought our drinks” (6), and that “as I would often hear Vidal repeat with glee, no number of dinner parties could possibly dry up a writer’s creative juices as quickly as a steady diet of teaching freshman composition” (8). Heather Neilson alternatively not only recovers but extends more significant literary memory. She reminds us that this comparison has a history, quoting Bernard F. Dick from 1974, who had astutely suggested that “the fact that ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967) appeared in the same year as ''Washington D.C.'' not only crystallizes the difference between these two literary rivals but also explains why Mailer has become the voice of his generation while Vidal has become its mocking persona” (Dick 27). In more recent years, Neilson notes the pattern has not held: The almost simultaneous appearance of ''Palimpsest'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'' can be seen
Mewshaw informs us, after recycling the Mailer/Vidal feud one more time, that “Vidal gave no sign of being bothered by the noise and the pollution,” that a “servant, Indian or Sri Lankan, brought our drinks,”{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|p=6}} and that “as I would often hear Vidal repeat with glee, no number of dinner parties could possibly dry up a writer’s creative juices as quickly as a steady diet of teaching freshman composition.”{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|p=8}} Heather {{harvtxt|Neilson|1997}} alternatively not only recovers but extends more significant literary memory. She reminds us that this comparison has a history, quoting Bernard F. Dick from {{date|1974}}, who had astutely suggested that “the fact that ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' ({{date|1967}}) appeared in the same year as ''Washington D.C.'' not only crystallizes the difference between these two literary rivals but also explains why Mailer has become the voice of his generation while Vidal has become its mocking persona.”{{sfn|Dick|1974|p=27}} In more recent years, Neilson notes the pattern has not held: The almost simultaneous appearance of ''Palimpsest'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'' can be seen as a piquant reversal of the expected projectories of their authors’ careers—Vidal at last writing openly about his private life, and Mailer confirming his growing interest in history and historiography. We would like to see Neilson develop these points more fully.
as a piquant reversal of the expected projectories of their authors’ careers— Vidal at last writing openly about his private life, and Mailer confirming his growing interest in history and historiography. We would like to see Neilson develop these points more fully.


Whether or not “Vidal vs. Mailer” was in any sense the fight of the century, a good literary feud can have a salutary effect on literary history. The Maxine Hong Kingston vs. Frank Chin fight, for example, has helped Asian-American writers and scholars make communally recognized literary constellations out of what would otherwise be random points of light, and we may ask, along these lines: What has the Gore/Norman fight produced? Reviewing the matter from various angles, including for example Fred
Whether or not “Vidal vs. Mailer” was in any sense the fight of the century, a good literary feud can have a salutary effect on literary history. The Maxine Hong Kingston vs. Frank Chin fight, for example, has helped Asian-American writers and scholars make communally recognized literary constellations out of what would otherwise be random points of light, and we may ask, along these lines: What has the Gore/Norman fight ''produced''? Reviewing the matter from various angles, including for example Fred Kaplan’s ''Gore Vidal: a Biography'' and Dick Cavett’s recollections of the televised parts of the feud just after Mailer’s death, one does not come away thinking that great battles have been won either by the Devil or the Lord.{{efn|Dick Cavett’s recollections are a great pleasure to read, as dozens of readers noted on his ''New York Times'' blog page. Miraculously, he frames the matter in such a way as to indicate how the weirdness of a given time touches the participants in estranging ways that are funny, awful, and invigorating: “It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer’s life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at ''Time'' magazine.”}} Fred Kaplan’s ''Gore Vidal: a Biography'' gives the chemical formulas for the various high-intensity exchanges between the two; Kaplan’s account gives much more than recycled spleen. There are also detailed portraits of intermediaries such as the influential editor Jason Epstein, contrasting responses to various phases of the relationship between Mailer and Vidal, and a tactful rendition of the highly cautious manner in which the two aging writers sidled up to one another in order to end the feud.{{efn|Published in the same year as Gore Vidal, Norman Podhoretz’ ''Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer'' is a picture of rancor for its own sake.}} The story of Mailer as a ''friend'' rather than as an ineluctable adversary emerges in Rachel Cohen’s ''A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854—1967''. This book is in some ways quite Mailerian, folding in the radical intuitionism of Mailer’s speculative biography ''Marilyn'' into the subjective force of ''The Armies of the Night'', in which the centering self stands up to history. The book braids together the pacts and patterns of hundreds of biographical books and articles, and if it is a little too general at times, it always proceeds form a genuine appreciation of the affiliations that explain the intensity of all literary quests. Mailer figures quite strongly in the last third of the book, with chapters on Mailer with Baldwin, with Marianne Moore, and with Robert Lowell.
Kaplan’s ''Gore Vidal: a Biography'' and Dick Cavett’s recollections of the televised parts of the feud just after Mailer’s death, one does not come away
thinking that great battles have been won either by the Devil or the Lord.<sup>9</sup>
 
Fred Kaplan’s ''Gore Vidal: a Biography'' gives the chemical formulas for the various high-intensity exchanges between the two; Kaplan’s account gives much more than recycled spleen. There are also detailed portraits of intermediaries such as the influential editor Jason Epstein, contrasting responses to various phases of the relationship between Mailer and Vidal, and a tactful rendition of the highly cautious manner in which the two aging writers sidled up to one another in order to end the feud.10 The story of Mailer as a
friend rather than as an ineluctable adversary emerges in Rachel Cohen’s ''A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854—1967''. This book is in some ways quite Mailerian, folding in the radical intuitionism of Mailer’s speculative biography Marilyn into the subjective force of ''The Armies of the Night'', in which the centering self stands up to history. The book braids together the pacts and patterns of hundreds of biographical books and articles, and if it is a little too general at times, it always proceeds form a genuine appreciation of the affiliations that explain the intensity of all literary quests. Mailer figures quite strongly in the last third of the book, with chapters on Mailer with Baldwin, with Marianne Moore, and with Robert Lowell.


There have been a few articles in which Mailer is not the Satanic adversary. John M. Kinder’s “The Good War’s “Raw Chunks”: Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' and James Gould Cozzens’s ''Guard of Honor''”
There have been a few articles in which Mailer is not the Satanic adversary. John M. Kinder’s “The Good War’s “Raw Chunks”: Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' and James Gould Cozzens’s ''Guard of Honor''”
returns to WWII via two 1948 novels to correct our misimpression that the “good war” was always good: “At best, what we now call the ‘Good War’ is a well-maintained fiction, a constellation of images, narratives, memories, and sound bites invoked to lend authority to everything from the War on Drugs to the current American-lead occupation of Iraq” (187). In this article, not only does Mailer become friends with another writer, he also gets to be the political good guy. Gary Rosenshield aligns Mailer with three other writers
returns to WWII via two 1948 novels to correct our misimpression that the “good war” was always good: “At best, what we now call the ‘Good War’ is a well-maintained fiction, a constellation of images, narratives, memories, and sound bites invoked to lend authority to everything from the War on Drugs to the current American-lead occupation of Iraq.”{{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=187}} In this article, not only does Mailer become friends with another writer, he also gets to be the political good guy. Gary Rosenshield aligns Mailer with three other writers in his article “Crime and Redemption, Russian and American style: Dostoevsky, Buckley, Mailer, Styron and Their Wards.” Many people have commented critically on Mailer’s involvement in the Abbot case, noting his valorization in contemporary American society, “his romanticization of the criminal, and his faith in the redemptive power of literary talent.”{{sfn|Rosenshield|1998|p=684}} The main virtue of Rosenshield’s essay is that he does not look at the activity of a single writer in isolation, instead choosing to compare Mailer, Styron and Dostoevsky to show the complex interrelations between judgment, risk and seduction in all of these cases. Rosenshield does what a scholar should do—he connects the impulsive judgments that energize daily journalism to the deeper responsibilities of historical memory. How does Mailer come off
in his article “Crime and Redemption, Russian and American style: Dostoevsky, Buckley, Mailer, Styron and Their Wards.” Many people have commented critically on Mailer’s involvement in the Abbot case, noting his
valorization in contemporary American society, “his romanticization of the criminal, and his faith in the redemptive power of literary talent” (684). The main virtue of Rosenshield’s essay is that he does not look at the activity of a single writer in isolation, instead choosing to compare Mailer, Styron and Dostoevsky to show the complex interrelations between judgment, risk and seduction in all of these cases. Rosenshield does what a scholar should do—he connects the impulsive judgments that energize daily journalism to the
deeper responsibilities of historical memory. How does Mailer come off
compared to others?:
compared to others?:
 
{{quote|By comparison to both Buckley and Dostoevsky, Mailer indeed seems reckless. What makes Mailer’s intercession so interesting in relationship to Dostoevsky’s is that like Dostoevsky he conceives his redemptive project in the broadest social and ideological terms. He even seems to have borrowed some of the rhetoric relating to the redemption of criminals directly from Dostoevsky, buttressing his sponsorship of [Jack Henry] Abbot—and the downtrodden in general—by framing it in a Dostoevskean progression from crime, imprisonment, and punishment to redemption.{{sfn|Rosenshield|1998|p=696}} }}
{{quote|By comparison to both Buckley and Dostoevsky, Mailer indeed seems reckless. What makes Mailer’s intercession so interesting in relationship to Dostoevsky’s is that like Dostoevsky he conceives his redemptive project in the broadest social and ideological terms. He even seems to have borrowed some of the rhetoric relating to the redemption of criminals directly from Dostoevsky, buttressing his sponsorship of [Jack Henry] Abbot—and the downtrodden in general—by framing it in a Dostoevskean progression from crime, imprisonment, and punishment to redemption. (696)}}
Rosenshield attempts to understand the phenomena but not just to play “gotcha.” He knows that several of these famous writer-criminal relationships have had “unfortunate outcomes”{{sfn|Rosenshield|1998|p=678}} and that the writers are aware of the risks, but that the American hunger for redemption makes those risks seem worthwhile to American writers.
 
Rosenshield attempts to understand the phenomena but not just to play “gotcha.” He knows that several of these famous writer-criminal relationships have had “unfortunate outcomes” (678) and that the writers are aware of the risks, but that the American hunger for redemption makes those risks seem worthwhile to American writers.


Mailer never tried to be average, to tack toward the center, and so the idea that we can better understand the range of possibilities by comparing something, a name, with Norman Mailer and it will often yield good results. We see this in two elegiac pieces, one from the ''Los Angeles Times'' and one from the ''New York Times'' after Mailer’s death. Morris Dickstein’s triptych “Mailer, Paley, Vonnegut: Same Era, Different Voices” pays homage to three distinctly different talents but puts them together not just because they all
Mailer never tried to be average, to tack toward the center, and so the idea that we can better understand the range of possibilities by comparing something, a name, with Norman Mailer and it will often yield good results. We see this in two elegiac pieces, one from the ''Los Angeles Times'' and one from the ''New York Times'' after Mailer’s death. Morris Dickstein’s triptych “Mailer, Paley, Vonnegut: Same Era, Different Voices” pays homage to three distinctly different talents but puts them together not just because they all
died around the same time but rather to make a claim about scale. Sam Tanenhaus’ “Requiem for Two Heavyweights” makes a comparison between Mailer and William F. Buckley, one that seems both more apt (because of the way these two men related to the mass media) and more surprising, considering that they often debated the issues from opposite ends of the spectrum. For Tanenhaus, these two were “more than public intellectuals they were citizen intellectuals, active participants in the great dramas of their time, and eager at times to pursue their ideas in democracy’s more bruising arenas.”
died around the same time but rather to make a claim about scale. Sam Tanenhaus’ “Requiem for Two Heavyweights” makes a comparison between Mailer and William F. Buckley, one that seems both more apt (because of the way these two men related to the mass media) and more surprising, considering that they often debated the issues from opposite ends of the spectrum. For Tanenhaus, these two were “more than public intellectuals they were citizen intellectuals, active participants in the great dramas of their time, and eager at times to pursue their ideas in democracy’s more bruising arenas.”


===IV. Mailer As A Political Symptom: Liberalism And Race===
. . .
 
One book in particular describes Mailer as having a political role that was at once pivotal and eccentric. George Cotkin’s ''Existential America'' works out the evolution of Mailer’s “giddy existentialism” (208) but ambiguously balances between saying that Mailer failed to maintain a position of leadership on the one hand and that he got himself ejected from such a role to maintain his purity: “By the 1960s a new generation had arisen to join in his critique of an existentialist perspective, certainly in terms of choice and commitment. But the student radicals would jettison the idiosyncratic theology of Mailer’s hip saints, and would reject much of his macho posturing” (207). Mailer’s errand, Cotkin writes, “required that he speak to the consciousness of an age without being part of it” (207).
 
The best academic articles have tended to discuss Mailer as a repository of our psycho-social rebellion. Several of these articles have been collected in a clutch of articles on Norman Mailer in the ''Journal of Modern Literature''. James Ryan, Ashton Howley and Scott Duguid each discuss Mailer as a figure of resistance with some ambivalence: Mailer is at once the resister-inchief who was celebrated as “General Marijuana,” but, increasingly in the last several decades, Mailer has been seen as a symptom of what is wrong with the left rather than medicine for the ailment. In “‘Insatiable as Good Old America’: ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' and Popular Criminality,” Ryan argues for the achievement of Mailer’s often disparaged novel ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', which Ryan considers neglected by the critics because of its formulaic adhesion to the genre of crime fiction and also because, by Mailer’s own admission, it was written hastily because he needed money. Ryan shows how the populist form of the novel is well suited to its themes and allows Mailer
a fresh angle on a favored theme, obscenity. The novel allows for fully fleshed treatment of American self-understanding circa 1980 in which vulgarity and obscenity (especially pornography) had become common cultural currency. Ryan points out that the repetitive structure of this populist form resonates with the structure of pornography, which in turn resonates with the American “diet of reality” (21). With the explosion of “reality culture” that has taken over contemporary popular media, Ryan’s analysis shows Mailer’s attention to America’s crude hunger for illusory “realities” to have been quite
prescient.
 
In “The Addiction of Masculinity: Norman Mailer’s ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' and the Cultural Politics of Reaganism,” Scott Duguid offers a sympathetic reading of Mailer’s treatment of masculinity in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' with the immediate aim of recovering the novel’s insight and thematic integrity. A larger ambition of this article is to address feminist disapprovals of Mailer’s work. He reads Mailer’s emphases on masculinity as a product of resistance to other ideological systems of power that can potentially compromise an individual’s sense of self. Further, masculinity is portrayed as “high dark comedy” in the novel with “narrative excesses” that point to its own “absurdity” points to Mailer’s awareness of its flaws (26). Duguid also takes a socio-historical approach to recognize the novel’s achievement, showing how its emergence coincided with “the cultural materialization of American maleness” (24).
 
Similar to the work of Ryan and Duguid, Ashton Howley’s “Mailer Again: Heterophobia in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''” entreats critics to look beyond the populist form of the critically neglected film in order to give it the hearing it deserves. According to Howley, it deserves critical attention because it shows that Mailer’s debate with his feminist detractors continues long after ''The Prisoner of Sex''. Critics may be interested in further exploring the extensive formal links that Mailer sets up between Reichian psychoanalysis and the crime fiction genre, which differentiates (slightly) the novel from the usual crime story. Howley, Ryan, and Duguid, individually and collectively, make it quite clear that it is a bit of a slander to accuse Mailer of having an “unblinking investment in masculinity” when his books are, in fact, obsessive examinations of the perils of masculine identity.
 
Three other academic articles take up Mailer’s role as—depending on whether or not you use the “L-word” to describe yourself—either the conscience of American liberalism or as the rightist fox in the leftist henhouse. In “The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of AntiLiberalism” Sean McCann positions Mailer’s entire novelistic ''oeuvre'' as a reaction against the dangers of a liberal politics. For McCann, Mailer’s literary obsession with a metaphysics of violence and his frequent depictions of sex (namely anal penetration!)point towards a more communitarian-based system of polity where members of a political community can debate and engage with pressing issues as a civic body, as against the individualistic self-assertion that Mailer thinks liberalism entails. McCann thus positions Mailer as a critic against the atomized and anomic individual that he thinks the political culture of liberalism creates, through his upholding of a vision of a community that taps into its collective culture, thereby accessing a more ideal political and social arrangement. McCann’s work is an astonishingly comprehensive effort, one that we would like to see as a fully realized book. However, the author knows too well why it would not be a good career move to do so. He begins by looking at the lavish praise Mikal Gilmore’s rather narrowly focused Shot in the Heart received: “There may be no better example of the way the world has changed around Norman Mailer than the recent critical esteem showered on Mikal Gilmore’s memoir ''Shot in the Heart''” (293). “To put it lightly,” McCann admits, “Norman Mailer has gone out of style.” From this sad beginning, though, he tells the story of why Mailer went out of style. Basically, Mailer won the battle against the dragon and so put himself out of business:
 
{{quote|For more than three decades Mailer wrote as if he were engaged in a life or death struggle with a gargantuan enemy, a manyheaded beast whose ability to absorb antagonists, swallow injuries, and engulf opposition, gave it the invulnerability of a mythological creature. It was the hideous immunity of this animal that Mailer always used to justify his literary outrages ... The great surprise of Mailer’s career, however, turns out to be that the enemy unexpectedly expired. In a twisted manner, Mailer’s side won. (295)}}
 
We will not attempt to summarize all the developments of this fascinating article, but will just suggest that McCann’s reading of ''Ancient Evenings'' as a response to America’s turn toward identity politics in the early 1980s brings this article to its astonishing close. It is highly recommended.
 
In another excellent article, T. H. Adamowski works similar ground when he hypothesizes in “Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer” that Norman Mailer (alongside Lionel Trilling and Leslie Fiedler) contributed to the demoralization of liberalism just before and after WWII through inadvertent critiques of liberalism from ''within'' its confines. Mailer began to portray ''forms of totalitarianism'' within liberalism itself after ''The Naked and the Dead'', effectively attacking liberalism from both the Left (in his paranoiac mode) and the rightist legacy of the counter Enlightenment tradition (that includes de Maistre, Lawrence, and Heidegger). By going beyond Trilling and Fiedler’s portrayals of liberals as political dupes, Mailer was ultimately prescient in his portrayal of liberals as weak and compromising, since he anticipated the 1960s adoption of this same notion. “Never let the troops become demoralized.”Adamowski writes near the conclusion of his article: “They might desert to the other side” (891). Closing with the triumph of Neo-Conservativism, the suggestion is, somewhat, that Mailer is to blame. Alan Petigny’s counterstatement “Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro,’ and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America” from the inaugural issue of The Mailer Review in an interesting rejoinder to the idea that Mailer et alia brought down the house of liberalism, as Petigny argues that Mailer and Company misconstrued the Eisenhower decade: “In ‘The White Negro,’ Mailer seemed to regard white middle-class America as
uptight and sexually repressed. While partially correct, Mailer failed to see what the majority of Americans at the time, and till this day, fail to see: a great and broad liberalization that was unfolding almost unnoticed during the fifties” (186). Petigny closes with an interesting paradox: “Norman Mailer’s hand-wringing about the lack of individuality in American Society was not a substantiation of his claims but of the reverse,” since the resonance of “The White Negro” was in fact “Evidence of an ascendant spirit during the postwar era—one which was more secular, more expressive, and—in the aggregate—less conformist than anything that had come before” (192). So three full cheers for literary liberalism.
 
Three essays return us to “The White Negro” in relation to racial anxiety. Andrea Levine, unlike many critics who have focused on the dialectic between white and black masculinity in “The White Negro,” claims that an anxiety concerning the vulnerable, white, Jewish body becomes central to the text. Mailer’s fetishization of the aggressive African American male actually serves to “obscure the image of the cowed, impotent Jew going meekly to the gas chamber” (61). Mailer’s (re)construction of Jewish male identity operates first by eradicating Jewish biological and cultural history, after which it deprecates femininity in order to recapture certain notions of white, Jewish masculine difference.
 
Drawing on the historical example of Muhammad Ali’s verbal challenges to Terrell and the general dynamics at work in the boxing ring, Christopher Brookeman’s “Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee: Mythologies of Representation in Selected Writings on Boxing by Norman Mailer” shows how Mailer reconstructs society as existential and oral—as opposed to conceptual and literary—by rewriting it in the key of black boxing culture. He argues that Mailer’s model of African American culture did not depend on a sole fixation on blackness alone but, rather, arose from a complex interplay between African American cultural creativity and a dominant white culture. Muhammad Ali, Brookeman helps us see, was both an aesthetic and political guru of sorts, a source of “mythic defiance and confidence” which essentially became the foundation for the renewal of Mailer’s career. Ali and African American artists like him “challenged the gradualist liberalism of civil rights leaders and their supporters in the Democratic Party” (50).
 
Finally, Shelly Eversley’s “The Source of Hip” compares Mailer and Kerouac’s treatments of interracial sex: “Hip happens as whiteness processes into blackness, at the moment when a cross-racial union of bodies suggests movement beyond rigid categories of identity, and ideally, toward the revelatory potential of integration” (261). Eversley finds that both Mailer and Kerouac “get fabulously close to the edge of integration’s potential” (266) but ultimately “participate consciously in a cultural economy that marginalizes individuals” that results in ultimate failure: “By fixing the line that separates ‘the Negro’ and ‘the white,’ they insure that there is no communion. They exemplify their own critique, a ‘failure of nerve’ and relinquish the opportunity to come, finally, to cross the most sacrosanct boundaries of postwar
U.S. culture” (267). This is a detailed and perspicacious essay, but I wish the author would give us the measure of who succeeded. White authors, for a variety of reasons and toward a number of aesthetic and political ends, challenged soft and hard taboos and put blacks and whites in bed together. The suggestion is made early in the essay that Mailer and Kerouac moved toward interracial sex to revivify their declining careers, but Mailer’s character Wilson, the gut-soldier in The ''Naked and the Dead'', is proof that Mailer was interested in just this sort of transgression before he ever gained fame. It would be nice if a progressive political development came all at once, as complete as Athena when she burst out of her father’s skull, but some things take more time.
 
Even the most formalistic approaches to Mailer’s work are connected to political perception. Very little has been written about Mailer’s achievement as an artist first and foremost. Mailer’s work would seem to sustain moral commentary much more readily than it does purely formalist appreciation, and critics such as Robert Merrill have complained that writing about Mailer’s life cannot sufficiently bolster claims that he is a first-rate American writer. According to Merrill, first-rate criticism of first-rate writing is needful, and in his 1992 revised Twayne study of Mailer, Merrill claims this burden has not been met. There have been a few attempts that warrant attention, however. In “Plexed Artistry: The Formal Case for Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost''” David Rampton begins by squaring off against Richard Rorty, who in Achieving Our Country attacked Pynchon, Mailer, and several other writers in for being writers too ready to portray America with “mockery” or “disgust.” Rampton challenges Rorty on ideological grounds but then defends Mailer as an artist. Unlike the reviewers and critics who complain about the formlessness of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Rampton demonstrates that Mailer’s work is patterned carefully and balanced almost obsessively. Rampton also draws attention to acts of reading in Harlot’s Ghost with a view to defending it on artistic rather than political grounds.
 
Lennon’s “Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian” locates Mailer’s key claims to our attention in the region between clearly fictional and clearly non-fictional writing. Lennon carefully approaches what he
describes as a “reversible dualism” between fiction and non-fiction, carefully avoiding prescriptive definitions of narrative forms. He concludes that Mailer’s primary purpose is not to blur genre so much as to engulf and ingest whatever form, stance or rhetoric he needs to carry his tales forward. Mailer succeeds in reminding us that there is no real difference between fact and fiction. Mailer was completely dedicated to the novel and to his role as a novelist, although the writer’s intentions and the reader’s own requirements may not coincide exactly
 
Louis Menand, in the ''New Yorker'', located Mailer’s greatest achievements in the interplay between fictional and non-fictional selves, a proliferation of protean selves that some readers did not like very much at all. The sense we get from Menand is that Mailer did a great deal to humanize writing and to make it more honest:
 
{{quote|Some readers found all these Normans obnoxious, a display of egotism. But Mailer was simply making apparent something that modern literature and, in particular, modern journalism preferred to disguise, which is that a book is written by a human being, someone with professional ambitions, financial needs, tastes and distastes, and this human being is part of the story whether he or she appears in the story or not. It was not important for readers to like this person; it was important to know him. Mailer did not put the first person into journalism; he took it out of the closet.}}
 
===V. Mailer And Final Things===
 
When Mailer is not read politically, he is considered eschatologically, but it is a false dualism to put Mailer’s politics to one side and his religion to the other. Discussions of Mailer’s beliefs about God, karma, the Devil, and the bureaucracy of hell don’t say very much when they do not flow into discussions of power relations.
 
Whether or not we believe in an afterlife, we enjoy imagining our way into and around such beliefs, and several articles show how Mailer’s fictive constructions guide us through the land of the dead. In “Books of the Dead: Postmortem Politics in Novels by Mailer, Burroughs, Acker, and Pynchon,” Kathryn Hume highlights Mailer’s usage of “ancient ritual instructions” (417) in his novel ''Ancient Evenings'', emphasizing especially his investment in ancient Egyptian myths in relation to the postmodern, mainly secular world
of the late twentieth century. She defends Mailer against accusations of obscenity by demonstrating that Mailer’s graphic representations of sexual and even excremental activities metaphorical celebrate forms of resistance that are at once spiritual and political. Against dehumanizing forces of modern life such as totalitarian ideology and unquestioned materialism, Hume argues, Mailer redeploys the imagery and ideas found in ''The Egyptian Book of the Dead'' in the service of liberation. This article could be said to read Mailer in a magical/utopian way, proceeding as ''Ancient Evenings'' does from underworld to reincarnation, whereas Hume’s book length study, ''American Dream'', ''American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960'', presents us with Mailer’s more dystopian underworld vision. In novels like ''An American Dream'' and ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'', Mailer fleshes out the “American Nightmare” by ironically distorting the heroic structure of descent and return (Hume 285); by problematizing notions of success, morality, and freedom (275!) and by portraying the running themes of lost innocence, of the dissolution of love in contemporary society, and of families with no future where children are not an expression of hope. These novels, Hume finds, generally project a demonic vision of America that undermines its rosier self-concepts.
 
Two articles explore religious aspects of Mailer’s recent fiction. In “''The Gospel According to the Son'' and Christian Belief,” Jeffrey F. L. Partridge takes issue with James Wood’s contention that the novel’s fails. According to Partridge, Mailer’s reverential treatment of Jesus successfully and paradoxically
dismantles the traditional Christian impulse to deify the Son. Mailer’s subtle revision of the gospel and his determined refusal to resort to merely shocking portrayals of Jesus make room for his characteristic explorations of the father/son relationship. Partridge also discusses Mailer’s metafictional inclusions of themes of writing, acts of authorship, and existentialism in the novel, as these formal elaborations amplify its theological concerns in resonant ways. In “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the
‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son'',” which is also in the ''Journal of Modern Literature'' cluster, Brian McDonald convincingly draws connections the thematization of evil in The Gospel According to the Son and American imperialism. Mailer, furthermore, revises the “gospel” form by focusing its polemical energy on the inner being of the divine figure, so as to foreground Jesus’ self-doubt instead of his external actions. By connecting Mailer’s reinterpretation of the life of Jesus to post-Holocaust theology and to American foreign policy, McDonald sensitizes us to variety of ways in which Mailer’s religious imagination resonates with timely political concerns.
 
===VI. Who Mailer Was Now===
 
Mailer outlived almost all of the post-WWII writers to whom he was most often compared. He received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for “Distinguished Contribution to American Letters” at the 2005 National Book Awards Ceremony, and Toni Morrison presented the award. Acknowledging Mailer as one of America’s “tallest lightening rods,” Toni Morrison in presenting the award praised him as a writer who is “Generous, intractable, often wrong, always engaged, mindful of and amused by his own power and his prodigious gifts, wide spirited.”
 
The secular and the sacred, the political and the innermost personal, constitute one another, and this mutuality comes through powerfully and strangely in the epigraph from Kafka that Morris Dickstein chose for his 1999 study, ''Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945—1970'': “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony” (i). This quotation takes us in two directions. Our need for order is such that the most blasphemous actions imaginable, should they continue regularly, are retrofitted in the imagination such that they become religion itself, part of the ritual they had previously upset. But then we think about established religious
forms and wonder: when was this priest a leopard? By “leopards” Dickstein means outsiders; a Jew or a homosexual or an ethnic minority was a leopard but is now a priest. Mailer was a leopard but is now a priest. In his opening autobiographical prelude, Dickstein describes the shift in his reading from sacred to secular-sacred: “As I grew disenchanted with the religious texts I had grown up on, secular literature became a kind of scripture for me, a continuous commentary on living in the world” (x). Writers like Bellow,
Mailer, Vidal, Roth, Updike, O’Connor, Ellison, Nabokov and others were “like Kafka’s ravenous leopards, invading and disrupting the sheltered precincts of our literary culture” (x). The old-time religion to which these writers remained true was always Modernism: “Bellow, O’Connor, Ellison, Malamud, Cheever, Updike, Baldwin, Mailer, and Roth were faithful to their aesthetic conscience, to the gospel according to James and Joyce, Kafka and Proust, even when the results showed up in their own faults of craft or character. They remained loyal to the novel even as its boundaries blurred and its hold on readers diminished” (20). Mailer is more than prominent in Dickstein’s pantheon; though Dickstein does not say that any one of these writers was first among equals, Mailer’s name is indexed over 120 times—more than any other writer.
 
But let me not close by counting entries in an index as if one were a reincarnation of Melville’s “Sub-sub-librarian,” a collector of extracts and whatnot. Even a review of so many reviews of Mailer’s world should end like this:
 
{{quote|We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods. (''Ancient Evenings'' 709)}}
 
We began by noting that Mailer prided himself as one who wished to intentionally exacerbate the consciences of the complacent. Mailer never stopped doing this, and it would seem he got better and better at it, but the market for exacerbation seems to have dried up. “Our dead hearts” prevail for the moment, but the right words in the right order create fields of magnetism, and the thunderous illuminations Mailer has left for readers await us, generously and patiently.


===Notes===
===Notes===
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* {{cite journal |last=Hume |first=Kathryn |author-mask=1 |title=Books of the Dead: Postmortem Politics in Novels by Mailer, Burroughs, Acker, and Pynchon |url= |journal=Modern Philology |volume=97 |issue=3 |date={{date|February 2000}} |pages=417–444 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Hume |first=Kathryn |author-mask=1 |title=Books of the Dead: Postmortem Politics in Novels by Mailer, Burroughs, Acker, and Pynchon |url= |journal=Modern Philology |volume=97 |issue=3 |date={{date|February 2000}} |pages=417–444 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Kakutani |first=Michiko |date={{date|2003-01-22|MDY}} |title=Quoting Himself on His Lofty Dream |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/22/books/books-of-the-times-quoting-himself-on-his-lofty-dream.html |work=New York Times |location= |page= |access-date={{Date|2021-07-05|ISO}} |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Kakutani |first=Michiko |date={{date|2003-01-22|MDY}} |title=Quoting Himself on His Lofty Dream |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/22/books/books-of-the-times-quoting-himself-on-his-lofty-dream.html |work=New York Times |location= |page= |access-date={{Date|2021-07-05|ISO}} |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kinder |first=John M. |title=The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' and James Gould Cozzens’s ''Guard of Honor'' |url= |journal=The Midwest Quarterly |volume=46 |issue=2 |date={{date|2005}} |pages=187–202 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry |date={{date|2002}} |title=The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer |url= |location=New York |publisher=Pleasure Boat Studio Press |author-link=Barry H. Leeds |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry |date={{date|2002}} |title=The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer |url= |location=New York |publisher=Pleasure Boat Studio Press |author-link=Barry H. Leeds |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lehtimäki |first=Markku |date={{date|2005}} |title=The Poetics of Norman Mailer’s Nonfiction: Self-Reflexivity, Literary Form, and the Rhetoric of Narrative |url= |location=Tampere |publisher=Tampere UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lehtimäki |first=Markku |date={{date|2005}} |title=The Poetics of Norman Mailer’s Nonfiction: Self-Reflexivity, Literary Form, and the Rhetoric of Narrative |url= |location=Tampere |publisher=Tampere UP |ref=harv }}
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* {{cite magazine |last=Manand |first=Louis |date={{date|2007-11-11|MDY}} |title=Norman Mailer |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/19/norman-mailer |magazine=The New Yorker |pages= |access-date={{date|2008-07-21|ISO}} |url-access=subscription |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Manand |first=Louis |date={{date|2007-11-11|MDY}} |title=Norman Mailer |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/19/norman-mailer |magazine=The New Yorker |pages= |access-date={{date|2008-07-21|ISO}} |url-access=subscription |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Merrill |first=Robert |date={{date|1992}} |title=Norman Mailer Revisited |url= |location=New York |publisher=Twayne |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Merrill |first=Robert |date={{date|1992}} |title=Norman Mailer Revisited |url= |location=New York |publisher=Twayne |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=Vidal and Mailer |url= |journal=South Central Review |volume=19 |issue=1 |date=Spring {{date|2002}} |pages=4–14 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=Vidal and Mailer |url= |journal=South Central Review |volume=19 |issue=1 |date={{date|2002}} |pages=4–14 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=https://www.nationalbook.org/norman-mailer-accepts-the-2005-medal-for-distinguished-contribution-in-american-letters/ |title=Toni Morrison Presents Norman Mailer with the 2005 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters |last=Morrison |first=Toni |date={{date|2005-11-16|MDY}} |website=National Book Foundation |publisher= |access-date={{date|2021-07-04|ISO}} |quote= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=https://www.nationalbook.org/norman-mailer-accepts-the-2005-medal-for-distinguished-contribution-in-american-letters/ |title=Toni Morrison Presents Norman Mailer with the 2005 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters |last=Morrison |first=Toni |date={{date|2005-11-16|MDY}} |website=National Book Foundation |publisher= |access-date={{date|2021-07-04|ISO}} |quote= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Neilson |first=Heather |title=Jack’s Ghost: Reappearances of John F. Kennedy in the Work of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=American Studies International |volume=35 |issue=3 |date={{date|October 1997}} |pages=23–41 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Neilson |first=Heather |title=Jack’s Ghost: Reappearances of John F. Kennedy in the Work of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=American Studies International |volume=35 |issue=3 |date={{date|October 1997}} |pages=23–41 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
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* {{cite book |last=Robbins |first=Bruce |date=1999 |title=Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress |url= |location=New York |publisher=NYU Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Robbins |first=Bruce |date=1999 |title=Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress |url= |location=New York |publisher=NYU Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum |first=Ron |date={{date|1998}} |title=Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum |first=Ron |date={{date|1998}} |title=Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Rosenshield |first=Gary |title=Crime and Redemption, Russian and American Style: Dostoevsky, Buckley, Mailer, Styron and Their Wards |url= |journal=The Slavic and East European Journal |volume=42 |issue=4 |date=Winter {{date|1998}} |pages=677–709 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Rosenshield |first=Gary |title=Crime and Redemption, Russian and American Style: Dostoevsky, Buckley, Mailer, Styron and Their Wards |url= |journal=The Slavic and East European Journal |volume=42 |issue=4 |date=Winter {{date|1998}} |pages=677–709 |access-date= |ref={{SfnRef|Rosenshield|1998}} }}
* {{cite journal |last=Ryan |first=James Emmett |title=‘Insatiable as Good Old America’: ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' and Popular Criminality |url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature |volume=30 |issue=1 |date=Fall 2006 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Ryan |first=James Emmett |title=‘Insatiable as Good Old America’: ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' and Popular Criminality |url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature |volume=30 |issue=1 |date=Fall 2006 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |date=2007 |title=The Mailer Review |url= |location=Tampa, FL |publisher=U of South Florida |editor-link=Phillip Sipiora |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |date=2007 |title=The Mailer Review |url= |location=Tampa, FL |publisher=U of South Florida |editor-link=Phillip Sipiora |ref=harv }}
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