Norman Mailer Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Norman Mailer

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 own affinities with the values and ideas of the Beat Generation. In these writings Mailer takes alienation as a given and demands that the artist oppose rather than participate in what he sees as the totalitarian tendency of American society. Indeed he views the artist as a rebel and announces that he himself is "imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time." Mailer is, therefore, an advocate of more rather than less expression, which for him really means choosing life over death, for in "every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit." Thus, for Mailer, the primary virtue is courage, the courage to live more by risking excursions into the unknown: by abandoning all forms of security, including received values and the dead-ended conclusions of reductive reasoning, and depending instead on the powers of instinct, sense, and intuition.

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