Norman Mailer Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Norman Mailer

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 of a man early accustomed to mother-love." Mailer would probably agree with the complaint of Philip Roth's Portnoy: "Because to be bad, Mother, that is the real struggle: to be bad--and to enjoy it! That is what makes men of us boys, Mother." If the central question of Saul Bellow's fiction is Joseph's in Dangling Man (1944)--"How should a good man live""--then the central question of Mailer's fiction might be posed as "How should a bad man live"" Mailer has struggled to become an American male and an American writer worth noticing by deliberately making himself bad, the official Bad Boy of contemporary letters, staking out as his territory the extremes of experience often excluded from American-Jewish fiction, including murder, rape, orgy, suicide, and psychosis.

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