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Norman Mailer: Works and Days/Introduction: Difference between revisions
Norman Mailer: Works and Days/Introduction (view source)
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{{DISPLAYTITLE:Introduction to ''Works and Days''}} | |||
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{{NM}} is Proteus. Perhaps no career in American literature has been at once so brilliant, varied, controversial, improvisational, public, productive, lengthy and misunderstood. | |||
Few American writers have had their careers on the minds of contemporary critics and on the anvil of public inspection for such a lengthy time span; none has been so reviled and celebrated in the same and so many seasons. The Mailer record, while sometimes obvious and redundant, has never been fully compiled and therefore never completely relished. Valuable pioneering efforts to compile this record have been made over the years, notably by [[Robert F. Lucid]], [[Laura Adams]] and [[Thomas Fiske]]. But whenever Mailer sought new opportunities, metamorphosing from novelist into biographer, film director, politician, public intellectual or sports reporter (and always back to novelist), the need for more bibliographic scaffolding became apparent. Because his direction changed so often, because his output has been so prodigious, and because his words have appeared in so many different and often obscure publications, all previous Mailer compilations, including my own, are fragmentary. ''Norman Mailer: Works and Days'' is built upon these earlier efforts and is much indebted to them. | Few American writers have had their careers on the minds of contemporary critics and on the anvil of public inspection for such a lengthy time span; none has been so reviled and celebrated in the same and so many seasons. The Mailer record, while sometimes obvious and redundant, has never been fully compiled and therefore never completely relished. Valuable pioneering efforts to compile this record have been made over the years, notably by [[Robert F. Lucid]], [[Laura Adams]] and [[Thomas Fiske]]. But whenever Mailer sought new opportunities, metamorphosing from novelist into biographer, film director, politician, public intellectual or sports reporter (and always back to novelist), the need for more bibliographic scaffolding became apparent. Because his direction changed so often, because his output has been so prodigious, and because his words have appeared in so many different and often obscure publications, all previous Mailer compilations, including my own, are fragmentary. ''Norman Mailer: Works and Days'' is built upon these earlier efforts and is much indebted to them. | ||
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