Word: mailer
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...NORMAN MAILER has stopped off in Hollywood once more. That this notorious literary moth would fail to return and singe his wings on the spotlights was unthinkable. A man whose nerves are so attuned, ay, unsheathed of any protective tissue, to the vibrations of sex and power must have found it difficult to have stayed away for so long. The last time he left quietly, his reputation on the decrescendo, his powers drained after grappling with his third novel, he dragged his speeded out carcass back to Brooklyn, the first act of his life as a serious artist a closed...
...nonfiction phase-second act if you please. This time around he has struck one of the main veins of the American consciousness with a biography of Marilyn Monroe, and he has mastered the art of eliciting a much vaster response with much less effort. Marilyn: a biography by Norman Mailer with pictures by the World's Greatest Photographers has made shock waves which have surpassed those the author is accustomed to creating in the literary pond, and has indeed touched the fancy of the masses...
...hard to tell just how profoundly he has invaded this sphere, for several bellweathers have been struck, and it is debatable which one strikes the innermost chord of the people. It is like Mailer went on a binge at a country fair on several tests of strength, and his sledgehammer rang a merry tune. Listen to the prizes! Who can say which is the Blue Ribbon of the Vastest Common Denominator? His speculation upon the possibilities of FBI or Kennedy interests involved in her death made a hearty feast for The National Enquirer; his countersuit with one of his sources...
...tough task. Other non-unique stories that echoed the past passed with barely a ripple of eyebrows--Elizabeth Taylor divorced Richard Burton, Atlantis was rediscovered off Cadiz, Spain. Other biographies of Monroe had been done before and passed out of print without a whimper, and many questioned what Mailer had brought to the task that gave it such notoriety...
...early fifties, while Monroe was rising through the ranks of hungry starlets to become the most popular blonde in the history of films--her rise included marriages to the two symbolic princes of midcentury America: Joe DiMaggio, the province of Muscle, and Arthur Miller, the state of Egghead,--Mailer had himself attacked Hollywood, largely on the strength of his first novel, and having failed as a scriptwriter, wrote a good, serious second echelon novel about Hollywood. While no Day of the Locust nor a Last Tycoon, Mailer's Deer Park was grudgingly accorded its own stubborn virtues a decade after...