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Norman Mailer


Self Description

Third-Party Descriptions

August 2012: Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate. His best work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, which was published in 1980, and for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mailer's book Armies of the Night was awarded the National Book Award.

Along with the likes of Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism.

In 1955, Mailer founded, among others, The Village Voice, an arts and politics oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mailer

August 2012: "Today’s reviewers tend to lionize the old talk-show dustups between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal or Noam Chomsky (the videos are on YouTube), but they’re unwilling to engage in that kind of intellectual combat themselves.* They praise the bellicosity of Norman Mailer and Pauline Kael, but mostly from afar. Mailer and Kael are your rebellious high school friends: objects of worship, perhaps, but not emulation. After all, it’s all so messy, and someone might get hurt."

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/08/writers_and_readers_on_twitter_and_tumblr_we_need_more_criticism_less_liking_.single.html

Relationships

RoleNameTypeLast Updated
Founder/Co-Founder of Village Voice Source Aug 7, 2012

Articles and Resources

Date Fairness.com Resource Read it at:
Aug 04, 2012 Against Enthusiasm: The epidemic of niceness in online book culture.

QUOTE: The problem with Liking is that it’s a critical dead-end, a conversation nonstarter. It’s opinion without evidence—or, really, posture without opinion....A better literary culture would be one that's not so dependent on personal esteem and mutual reinforcement. It would not treat offense or disagreement as toxic.

 Slate