Word: mailerian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mailer has tested this magic on the Viet Nam War, American presidential politics, the women's movement, the moon program. He tries it now upon another American public event that possessed, even before he wrote about it, a certain Mailerian quality: the execution, early in 1977, of Gary Gilmore, 36, a Utah murderer who refused to appeal his conviction and death sentence and demanded that the state kill him. Utah obliged, but only after a ritual that turned Gilmore into a grotesque celebrity. Shortly before the prisoner was seated in front of a dirty mattress to face the firing...
...George of the book's title then at least a minister of one of the two political parties that Mailer sees as possibly "the true churches of America." Yet McGovern and his followers have for Mailer both an unbecoming air of innocence and an insufficiency of evil. In Mailerian terms, this usually means a lack of recognition of the demoniac part of human nature...