Word: mailer
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...SEVENTEEN years later, Mailer is back at the top, a master of a new form--nonfiction infused with all the technique and daring of the novelist. His recovery from the strain of the novel has taken the route of retreat, with the MacArthurian pledge that he will one day return to the grail to overshadow his The Naked and The Dead. Since Armies of the Night in 1967, Mailer's reputation has been restored to prominence; the decade of inattention was revealed to have wounded Mailer but not to have changed his direction. In Armies of the Night, Mailer mentions...
...subsequent works, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of A Fire on the Moon, The Prisoner of Sex, and King of the Hill, and St. George and the Godfather, Mailer has continued to attack large public figures and topical issues. And the books, no matter what their worth, meet with an increasing critical impatience for him to move on. The mind which could declare that "God, in his wisdom, made me a fool" could show us so much about ourselves through an investigation of himself, with unrelenting honesty no matter how humiliating the incident. That mind became earmarked with certain...
THESE METAPHORS held up when he was writing about himself, but with Marilyn, Mailer has tread over a few ethical lines that, if they aren't legally or morally reprehensible, do vitiate his professional powers...
...introduction to Marilyn, Mailer freely admits that the major portion of his sources for the book were two previously written works on Monroe--Norma Jean, by Fred Guiles, and Marilyn Monroe by Maurice Zolotow. Mailer said he first contracted to write a preface to this collection of over a hundred photographs organized by photographer and entrepreneur Larry Schiller because he needed money. $50,000 for 25,000 words in two months, and Mailer could once again make the alimony payment to his four former wives, repay his agent, Scott Meredith, and as he revealed on the Cavett show...
...trouble with the formulation of this book is a philosophical premise that Mailer, in his God's Own Fool honesty, declares in the introduction, the trouble with trying the write a biography of Marilyn Monroe is that her life was based on the publicity of a string of newspaper gossip column lies which struck their way into the American consciousness deeper than the quiet facts. As her fame increased, Monroe became immersed in these tangled stories, living some...