Word: mailer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...intelligent and exhaustingly researched biography of Lawrence, Brenda Maddox succeeds in raising her subject above the level of talented pornographer. The 600 page-plus D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage, is a volume of Mailer-ish manly heft. Nevertheless, the author manages to sustain the reader's interest throughout, allowing Lawrence to stand on his own--contradictions...
Americans, it seems, have come full circle. It's easy to forget that as recently as 1948, Norman Mailer was still using the word fug in his novels. There may have been a sexual revolution - at least for those college-educated whites who came of age with John Updike's swinging Couples, Philip Roth's priapic Portnoy and Jong's Fear of Flying - but the revolution turned out to have a beginning, a middle and an end. "From the time of the Pill to Rock Hudson's death, people had a sense of freedom," says Judith Krantz, author of Scruples...
...summer is a train wreck of a novel by John Gregory Dunne, a very good writer (True Confessions, Harp) whose fiction usually stays nicely on the rails. Trying to figure out what went wrong with Playland (Random House; 494 pages; $25) should keep writers' workshops twittering until Norman Mailer publishes his next thousand pager...
Further fine-tunings of what hipness might mean became an offhand intellectual pursuit of the '50s. In a commentary on his much discussed 1957 essay, The White Negro, Norman Mailer distinguished between the lower-class origins of the people he termed "hipsters" and the middle-class, college- educated, moralizing Beats. But he figured they both shared "marijuana, jazz, not much money and a community of feeling that society is the prison of the nervous system...
Gary Gilmore gained international notoriety when, after being convicted of murder, he successfully fought for his own execution; Norman Mailer wrote about Gary's final months of life in his 1979 fact-based novel The Executioner's Song, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Shot in the Heart is a more personal story, as Mikal Gilmore searches for insight into the origin of evil by examining his family -- his mother's shattered Mormon faith, his father's secret criminal past. Both Gilmore parents, haunted by their past, took their frustrations out on their children, dooming them to lives of anger...