SOURCE: "Romantic Self-Creations: Mailer and Gilmore in The Executioner's Song," in Contemporary Literature. No. XXXI, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 434-47.

In the following essay, Edmundson discusses Mailer's portrayal of Gilmore in The Executioner's Song in light of Mailer's romantic narrative style and Emersonian literary aspirations.

Romantic writers are, for better and worse, obsessed with originality. In practice this means that each one who aspires to matter has to initiate his life as an artist with a story about what originality is, and that story must itself strike readers as being a new one. To compound the difficulty, the romantic writer is compelled, even as he recounts his version of originality, to be exemplifying it. Emerson sets out to do this much in his most celebrated essay, "Self-Reliance." The formula for originality he puts forward there is a simple one: you become original by listening to yourself. Genius derives from...