Word: mailer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...August 1948, a wiry young man with kinky hair, cupped ears and an amiable smile came back to the U.S. after spending a year as a G.I. bill student at the Sorbonne, and found that he had become the overnight lion of American letters. Norman Mailer's brutal, scatological novel of war on a Pacific island, The Naked and the Dead, was in its eleventh week as the nation's top bestseller, and the critical ovation was still going on. A few reviewers detected the strong influence of Melville and Dos Passos in Mailer's massive novel...
Proud Rifleman. Doing it was no accident. As a precocious undergraduate at Harvard, Mailer was making his plans, and when the Army drafted him, early in 1944, his only concern was where he would be sent ("I worried whether a great war novel would be written about Europe or the Pacific"). After serving in various rear-echelon jobs and, briefly and proudly, as an infantry rifleman on Leyte and Luzon, he returned to the U.S., wrote The Naked and the Dead in 15 methodical months-exactly according to plan...
...young man's autobiography did not follow the plot. Although Mailer continued to write prodigiously, he never again came close to his first great acclaim. Barbary Shore, his second novel, was a flop. His third, The Deer Park, a study of the tribal sex practices of Hollywood, was a bestseller largely because the word got around that it was dirty (it was), but the critics frowned. By the time his Advertisements for Myself-a threadbare collection of past and future projects, loosely stitched together with some narcissistic autobiographical notes-appeared, late last year, it was all too clear that...
...amateur detectivisms is a rattle-trap French dance hall run by a blackmailer, who unknown to Miss Bardot has got the drop on her husband. The husband, played by Henri Vidal, has just stormed into the establishment to try to get himself off the hook, when the black-mailer-owner is murdered. The inevitable "innocent bystandars," none of whom, as Miss Bardot later discovers in her quest for information on the crime, are particularly innocent, witness Vidal's entrance, call the police, and set off the fireworks...
...Fair Players. All this sentiment got a loud echo in Manhattan last week from something called "the Fair Play for Cuba Committee," a group of 28 including Sartre, his friend Simone de Beauvoir, Novelists Norman Mailer and Truman Capote (who explained that "my stepfather is Cuban"), and British-born New Yorker Drama Critic Kenneth Tynan ("Americans tend to judge a regime on the extent to which it likes America"). In a seven-column, $4,725 ad in the New York Times, the Fair Players charged that the U.S. press is deliberately distorting the news from Cuba. Item: press reports...