SOURCE: "Introduction," in Modern Critical Views: Norman Mailer, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1986, pp. 1-6.

In the following essay, Bloom considers Mailer's unconventional literary production and problematic critical reputation as a remarkable author who "has written no indisputable book." However, according to Bloom, Mailer will likely endure "as the representative writer of his generation."

I

Mailer is the most visible of contemporary novelists, just as Thomas Pynchon is surely the most invisible. As the inheritor of the not exactly unfulfilled journalistic renown of Hemingway, Mailer courts danger, disaster, even scandal. Thinking of Mailer, Pynchon, and Doctorow among others, Geoffrey Hartman remarks that:

The prose of our best novelists is as fast, embracing, and abrasive as John Donne's Sermons. It is polyphonic despite or within its monologue, its confessional stream of words….

Think of Mailer, who always puts himself on the line, sparring, taunting, as macho as...