Word: mailer
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AFTERWORDS: NOVELISTS ON THEIR NOVELS, edited by Thomas McCormack. The anxiety, excitement and loneliness of confronting blank sheets of paper, sharply recalled and brightly written by 14 novelists, including Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Louis Auchincloss...
...that sexual expression is primarily a social phenomenon. Far from asserting a primordial urge, it varies from culture to culture and from individual to individual. In Polynesia, what the West calls foreplay is epilogue, not prologue, to coitus. Gagnon notes that for some writers-among them Lawrence, Hemingway and Mailer-sex is as much a political as a procreative process; Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover struck a calculated blow against the morality of the time. To prostitutes, it is only a livelihood, and frequently no more erotic than punching a clock. Some clerical celibates abstain for life...
...Organization Man" syndrome of modern sociology, do have different spiritual centers even if their everyday behavior seems tightly organized and compulsively conformist. The simple fact that most of us have genes and cultural traits acquired somewhere else than in America necessitates a fence-straddling approach to national identity. Norman Mailer, among others, has tried to speak to the American side of us, i.e., to the side that we have acquired since getting off the boat. Philip Roth, on the other hand, has attempted to bring us back to the boat while we sit, stagnant, in America and has superbly evoked...
...fusion remains necessary, not only if Mailer or Roth would like to become the next "great American writer," but also because we all are in pursuit of roots and future at the same time. So the radical interpretation of history, whether in arts or in archives, must save us from solipsism at the same time as it delivers us from the social scientists...
Rumors had been buzzing that if Norman Mailer won a National Book Award this year, he would turn it down in a gesture of defiance to the Establishment. But when Mailer was named winner in arts and letters for The Armies of the Night, he accepted. Not for him the self-denial of Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused a Nobel prize in 1964. "Sartre said he did not want people to refer to him as Sartre the Nobel prizewinner, but just as Sartre," Mailer recalled. "The fact is, the bourgeois call him Sartre the perverted existentialist...