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Norman Kingsley Mailer |
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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 of work that includes both fiction and nonfiction and that is characterized by its author's flagrant disregard for literary tradition, Mailer--who Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Andrew Gordon dubbed "the official Bad Boy of contemporary letters"--stands as one of the more controversial, albeit combative, figures within the arena of twentieth-century literature. Respected by some critics for his portrayal of modern culture and his efforts to confront readers' assumptions regarding the relationship between sex, violence, and power in postwar society, Mailer has been reviled by others for his radical political theories, his focus on murder, psychosis, suicide, and other acts of violence, and his invention of new means of expression that shatter the barriers between such time-honored classifications as fiction, journalism, and autobiography.
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