Word: mailer
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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...
...between, I was with Norman Mailer at thePentagon, with H. Rap Brown at Columbia, withShort (golden curls, white jeans, black boots) atHarvard. Short, who died 11 years ago of cancer,was a gentle anarchist. He would parade withplacards whose main purpose was to confuse. Thenhe moved to existentialism and agnosticism, and Ifollowed. He ended his magnificent piece on theDays of Rage this...