[This entry was updated by J. Michael Lennon (Wilkes University) from his update in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, volume 6, pp. 162-183, of the entries by Philip H. Bufithis (Shepherd College) in DLB 2: American Novelists Since...

Norman Mailer's achievement lies primarily in his treatment of the conflict between man's search for self-actualization and the strictures society places upon him. Mailer has rendered this theme with an energy of style, an ideational power, and a vivid...

After almost fifty years as a literary celebrity and a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Norman Mailer still defies critics and scholars to define his niche as a writer. Some interpreters periodically attempt to characterize him as...

Since his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948, Norman Mailer has written some forty books, including novels, essays, political journalism, poetry, drama, and screenplays. References to his writing appear in discussions of the...

Norman Mailer's achievement lies primarily in his treatment of the conflict between man's search for self-actualization and the strictures society places upon him. Mailer has rendered this theme with an energy of style, an ideational power, and a vivid...

Norman Mailer has labored for most of his literary career to repudiate what he himself describes as "the one personality he found absolutely insupportable--the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away--he had the softness...

In various newspaper columns, essays, interviews, and novels from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, Norman Mailer has brooded over the psychological and cultural implications of what he has termed the philosophy of Hip and, in so doing, expressed his...

Since the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, catapulted Norman Mailer to sudden fame in the late 1940s, he has been alternately praised and criticized due to his outspoken opinions regarding U.S. society and politics. With a body...

Norman Kingsley Mailer (born 1923), American author, film producer and director, wrote one of the most noteworthy American novels about World War II. Only in his later political journalism did he reach that level of achievement again. Norman Mailer was...