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The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer by Barry H. Leeds Pdf
Cultural Writing. THE ENDURING VISION OF NORMAN MAILER is Professor Barry H. Leeds' second book about one of America's most respected, most controversial, and most prolific authors. It looks at Mailer from where Leeds' first volume left off and takes him on through his most recent works. "Leeds' ideas are engaging, his enthusiasm infectious, and his prose mercifully free of critical jargon.Recommended for contemporary literature collections"--William Gargan in Library Journal. This is literary criticism with a heart and soul, and with an appreciation of subject which is so often missed in contemporary analysis.
This book is a comprehensive study of the work of the American author Norman Mailer, charting his response to critical events in his country's development since 1945. Focusing on Mailer's descriptions of World War II, 1960s counter-culture, the Vietnam War, the Apollo 11 mission and the execution of Gary Gilmore in Utah in 1977, the book analyses the native vernaculars in ten of his most critically acclaimed works. Moving beyond politically orientated scholarship, the author outlines Mailer's New York, American GI, Mid-West and Southern styles, contextualising his prose against earlier American authors, including Henry Adams, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, and positioning his writing alongside contemporary notables such as Joan Didion, William Burroughs and Truman Capote. Incorporating over forty years of scholarship in the form of articles, reviews and interviews, this book pinpoints the American attributes in Mailer's writing with a view to identifying trends in post-war American literary movements, the Beat Generation, New Journalism and Pop Art among others.
Understanding Norman Mailer by Maggie McKinley Pdf
The first book of literary criticism to examine this Pulitzer Prize winner's entire body of work As a renowned novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, speaker, aspiring politician, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Norman Mailer was one of the most prominent American literary and cultural figures of the second half of the twentieth century. Over the course of his expansive sixty-year career, Mailer published nearly forty original works of fiction and nonfiction, served as a counterculture activist, and was cofounder of the Village Voice. Twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Mailer also received the National Book Award and the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to Arts and Letters, a lifetime achievement award granted by the National Book Foundation. Understanding Norman Mailer is the first book of literary criticism to address Mailer's impressive body of work in its entirety, from his first publication to his last. Situating these volumes in their historical and cultural context, Maggie McKinley traces the major themes and philosophies that pervade Mailer's canon, analyzing his representations of gender, sexuality, violence, technology, politics, faith, celebrity, existentialism, and national identity. McKinley moves chronologically through Mailer's career, illuminating the many genres, styles, and perspectives with which Mailer experimented over time, demonstrating his remarkable artistic reach. McKinley also addresses Mailer's reputation as a combative public figure who, amid controversy surrounding his personal life and public persona, remained committed to lively intellectual debate. Through Understanding Norman Mailer, an accessible introduction to Mailer's life and work, McKinley offers a unique retrospective, articulating the development and changes within Mailer's ideas over time while highlighting concerns that remained at the center of his work for decades.
Selected Letters of Norman Mailer by Norman Mailer Pdf
A genuine literary event—an illuminating collection of correspondence from one of the most acclaimed American writers of all time Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 30 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific—or more exposed—than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence (approximately 20 million words), many of them deeply personal, keeping a copy of almost every one. Now the best of these are published—most for the first time—in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and, it seems, several lifetimes. Together they form a stunning autobiographical portrait of one of the most original, provocative, and outspoken public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Compiled by Mailer’s authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and organized by decade, Selected Letters of Norman Mailer features the most fascinating of Mailer’s missives from 1940 to 2007—letters to his family and friends, to fans and fellow writers (including Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth), to political figures from Henry Kissinger to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and to such cultural icons as John Lennon, Marlon Brando, and even Monica Lewinsky. Here is Mailer the precocious Harvard undergraduate, writing home to his parents for the first time and worrying that his acceptances by literary magazines were “all happening too easy.” Here, too, is Mailer the soldier, confronting the violence of war in the Pacific, which would become the subject of his masterly debut novel, The Naked and the Dead: “[I’m] amazed how casually it fits into . . . daily life, how very unhorrible it all is.” Mailer the international celebrity pledges to William Styron, “I’m going to write every day, and like Lot’s Wife I’m consigning myself to a pillar of salt if I dare to look back,” while the 1980s Mailer agonizes over the fallout from his ill-fated friendship with Jack Henry Abbott, the murderer who became his literary protégé. (“The continuation of our relationship was depressing for both of us,” he confesses to Joyce Carol Oates.) At last, he finds domestic—and erotic—bliss in the arms of his sixth wife, Norris Church (“We bounce into each other like sunlight”). Whether he is reflecting on the Kennedy assassination, assessing the merits of authors from Fitzgerald to Proust, or threatening to pummel William Styron, the brilliant, pugnacious Norman Mailer comes alive again in these letters. The myriad faces of this artist and activist, lover and fighter, public figure and private man, are laid bare in this collection as never before. Praise for Selected Letters of Norman Mailer “Extraordinary.”—Vanity Fair “As massive as the life they document . . . the autobiography [Mailer] never wrote . . . a kind of map, from the hills and rice paddies of the Philippines through every victory and defeat for the rest of the century and beyond.”—Esquire “The shards and winks at Mailer’s own past that are scattered throughout the letters . . . are so tantalizing. They glitter throughout like unrefined jewels that Mailer took to the grave.”—The New Yorker “Indispensable . . . a subtle document of an unsubtle man’s wit and erudition, even (or especially) when it’s wielded as a weapon.”—New York “Umpteen pleasures to pluck out and roll between your teeth, like seeds from a pomegranate.”—The New York Times
Author : J. Michael Lennon Publisher : Simon and Schuster Page : 960 pages File Size : 49,7 Mb Release : 2014-10-28 Category : Biography & Autobiography ISBN : 9781439150214
Norman Mailer's Later Fictions by J. Whalen-Bridge Pdf
Norman Mailer s Later Fiction considers five works - Ancient Evenings (1983), Tough Guys Don t Dance (1984), Harlot's Ghost (1991), The Gospel According to the Son (1997), The Castle in the Forest (2007) - to examine, for the first time in a full volume, Mailer s literary maturity. Essays from esteemed scholars, Mailer's wife, andeditor, discuss Mailer s modes of cultural critique, connecting his political, theological, sexual, and aesthetic insights. This book will be essential reading for all Mailer scholars and offers provocative insights in such areas as postmodern American writing, masculinity studies, and the developing interface of literary and religious studies.
Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950-75 by Maggie McKinley Pdf
Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950-75 explores the intersections of violence, masculinity, and racial and ethnic tension in America as it is depicted in the fiction of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth. Maggie McKinley reconsiders the longstanding association between masculinity and violence, locating a problematic paradox within works by these writers: as each author figures violence as central to the establishment of a liberated masculine identity, the use of this violence often reaffirms many constricting and emasculating cultural myths and power structures that the authors and their protagonists are seeking to overturn.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature by Jay Parini Pdf
This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays thatreflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf.At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures arediscussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of the writer's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with abibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion.A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers a close reading of the given work,placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticatedenough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating.The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they alsogather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim forcomprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right.In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.
Poignant, funny, tragic, steamy, Barry Leeds A Moveable Beast is his most personal book to date, and shows that he himself, shaped by literature and life experience, is a work in progress.
The end of the Second World War saw a “crisis of white masculinity” brought on by social change. As a result, several prominent white male pop culture figures sought out and appropriated African American cultural trappings to benefit from what they believed were powerful black masculinities. In He Thinks He’s Down, Katharine Bausch draws on case studies from three genres – the writings of Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac, advertising and aesthetics in Playboy magazine, and action narratives of Blaxploitation films – to illustrate how each one engaged with black tropes while simultaneously doing little to change the racial and gendered stereotypes that perpetuated the power of white male privilege.
The Twentieth-Century American Fiction Handbook by Christopher MacGowan Pdf
THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION Accessibly structured with entries on important historical contexts, central issues, key texts and the major writers, this Handbook provides an engaging overview of twentieth-century American fiction. Featured writers range from Henry James and Theodore Dreiser to contemporary figures such as Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, and Sherman Alexie, and analyses of key works include The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Color Purple, and The Joy Luck Club, among others. Relevant contexts for these works, such as the impact of Hollywood, the expatriate scene in the 1920s, and the political unrest of the 1960s are also explored, and their importance discussed. This is a stimulating overview of twentieth-century American fiction, offering invaluable guidance and essential information for students and general readers.
The nonfiction debut from the author of the international bestseller Sacred Games about the surprising overlap between writing and computer coding Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code? Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an "Indian Mafia" in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer's art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.
Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. LGBT Studies. THE END OF THE SHERRY recounts what happens to a young American who finds himself abandoned in southern Spain in 1965 with a dog and a dubious car, who stumbles into work as a nightclub pianist and stays for three improbable years. His own adventures blossom into a portrait of provincial Spain toward the end of the Franco dictatorship—bleakness that breaks into unexpected hilarity even as the author discovers his calling as a person and a writer. His return to Spain after the death of Franco puts it all into perspective.
Mike O’Connor is a poet and a translator of Chinese literature. A native son of the Olympic Peninsula, Washington State, he spent more than a decade farming in the Dungeness-Sequim River Valley and cedar logging and tree-planting in the Olympic Mountains. From 1979 until 1995, he lived mostly in the Republic of China, Taiwan, studying Chinese language and culture while working as a journalist. A MFA graduate of the Jack Kerouac School, Naropa University, and a recipient of a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he currently resides with his wife Liu Ling-hui, a dance teacher and choreographer, in Port Townsend, Washington. When the Tiger Weeps is his eighth book.