I loved his book Tough Guys Don’t Dance.
The Naked and the Dead woke me up. Thank you.
RIP
ETA “He was co-founder of The Village Voice alternative newspaper in New York.” I had no idea. Wow. Again, thank you Mr. Mailer.
Since there were two threads on this topic, I have merged them.
Sorry, Tuckerfan, I liked your title better… but detop was first.
That’s the kind of mentality whixch would have given us Ode to a Greek Pot, you realize that, don’t you?
May he rest in peace. Never quite wrote the Great American Novel (but then who has?). My favourite Mailer work - The Executioner’s Song.
con:
The Naked and the Dead used Dos Passos as a crib-sheet, and became the Great War Novel of its generation more because it came out first, not because it was the best. Mailer just won the veteran’s typing derby of 1945.
Stabed his wife; postured like a tough guy but still let himself be conned by Jack Henry Abbott, who then stabbed a waiter; annoying juvenile obsession with buttfucking.
pro:
When Dick Cavett, Gore Vidal and Janet Flanner finally shut up and let him talk, what he had to say was really quite eloquent and won the audience back. Unfortunately all I could find of the event online cuts off before this, at “fold it 5 ways and stick it where the moon don’t shine.”
In The Executioner’s Song and Oswald’s Tale Mailers has empathy and the abilty to describe the lives of losers and small-timers that none of his contemporaries like Vidal or Tom Wolfe ever had.
That’s a fuggin’ shame.
Yeah, I noticed that . . . Bonfire of the Vanities tells the story from the POV of Master of the Universe Sherman McCoy, from the POV of dissolute journalist Peter Fallow, from the POV of striving ADA Larry Kramer, from the POV of the unnamed Jewish mayor – but we never, ever get a look inside the head of Harold Lamb or any other black or lower-class person, not even the opportunistic Al Sharpton parody. It’s like they don’t really exist as people in Wolfe’s universe; they’re simply forces of nature.
Heller, Vonnegut, Mailer. All the “untraditional” WWII writers are going quickly.