Word: mailers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like a number of his contemporaries-Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Irwin Shaw and John Home Burns-Vance Bourjaily salvaged a good first novel (The End of My Life) out of the rubble of World War II. Critics spotted him among this cadre of new novelists, who became part of the curriculum for an American literary renaissance. The smart writers paid no attention. Neither life nor art traipses after textbooks, and the Mailers and Vidals went their separate ways. But Bourjaily, now 54, has never escaped the stigma of premature recognition. On the appearance of each of his next five novels...
...consciously unpretentious bars--though that doesn't necessarily mean they're cheap. First, there's the aforementioned Cronin's, with large 70 cent light draft on tap and real atmosphere. For example, ask Mr. Cronin (the short graying guy with the cigar behind the bar) about Norman Mailer '43. He'll remember Mailer only as the guy who didn't pay his bills. Anyway, Cronin's is filled with working people who talk about local sports--"if only that kid from Chelsea hadn't dropped the punt in the second quarter B.C. wouldn't have lost 41-15"--and empathetic...
...right (the John Birch Society, Ku Klux Klan) as well as the left (the Socialist Workers Party, Students for a Democratic Society). The FBI kept handy a list of people-26,000 strong at one point-who were to be detained during a national emergency (including Novelist Norman Mailer). The Army accumulated the names of 100,000 people who were involved, even tangentially, in political protest activities (including Illinois Senator Adlai Stevenson III, who made the list for merely attending a peaceful political rally watched by the service's agents). The CIA surpassed everyone, maintaining a catchall index...
JOHN LEONARD HAS a great job--chief cultural correspondent of The New York Times, which apparently means that he can write wherever and whenever he wants, as long as it's about something vaguely cultural. Yes, vaguely; his first few articles have been about, on the one hand, Norman Mailer and Irving Howe and starving New York writers, but on the other hand Jerry Rubin and autopsies. He writes long and with a good deal of occasionally abused stylistic freedom, and he has one Cause and one Unfortunate Fixation...
Jimi Hendrix. Brian Jones. William Burroughs. Andy Warhol. Janis Joplin. Lou Reed. Edith Piaf. Baudelaire. Norman Mailer. Rastafarianism. Playwright Sam Shepherd...