Lennon, J. Michael (2013). Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1439150214. OCLC 873006264. That's the generous read of this. The less generous read is that Mailer's issues are the same as the novel, and that the title is a way to cloak those issues with a portentousness that will redeem the work. But whether or not Mailer is as guilty as the reader of the book, the title does call into question scores of assumptive behaviors from genre novels of the sixties, things people gobbled up without a thought. Bersani, Leo (1972). "Interpretation of Dreams". In Braudy, Leo (ed.). Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. pp.120–126.

Norman Mailer. Was he just a bad man, misogynist, and curmudgeon? Or was he a deep thinker, great writer and possible genius? I think probably both. He was full of himself as a younger man and he liked to antagonize anyone he could. He certainly had trouble with females. Do I read him because it is sensible to know the enemy? No, I think he was so perceptive concerning American society. I aways get insights from his books. Mas Mailer é infinitamente mais contundente, agressivo e incisivo. Mas também mais íntimo, complexo e dubitativo.

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It is possible, of course, that Mailer was being deliberately outrageous. Nevetheless, this is the statement of a moral cretin. In his article "Confessions of the Last American", Conor Cruise O'Brien claimed AON as an important resource for historians "concerned with the moral and emotional climate of America in the late Sixties". [34] O'Brien narrows historical information to the white middle-class and intellectual participation in the protests, along with race relations. Praised for his scholarly analysis in AON, O'Brien credits Mailer for lending an important breathe of life into the history surrounding the march on the Pentagon through his "honest" re-telling of events. Many critics believe that The Executioner’s Song (1979) is Mailer’s best book. Subtitled A True Life Novel, it tells the In Cold Blood–type story of the arrest and execution by firing squad of Gary Gilmore, a psychopathic killer who had spent most of his thirty-odd years in jail. Written in a clipped, unembellished style, the book contains some of Mailer’s most urgent and compelling prose. Considered as a moral document, however, The Executioner’s Song is profoundly repulsive. For Mailer does not simply delve into and display the humanity of the tortured killer he writes about: he in effect offers him up as a kind of hero, a courageous “outsider” who deserves our sympathy as a Victim of Society and our respect as an implacable rebel. No study of America’s cultural revolution can omit the case of Norman Mailer: novelist, wife-stabber, political activist, sometime candidate for mayor of New York, and perpetual enfant terrible. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1923, Mailer was brought up in Brooklyn, “a nice Jewish boy,” as he once put it, from a middle-class family of first-generation immigrants. Mailer matriculated at Harvard in 1939, graduating in 1942. In 1944 he married for the first of (so far) six times. From 1944 to 1946, he served with the U.S. Army in Japan and the Philippines.

Much occurs after this statement, but I cling to the hope that this might be his message, that when you crawl out of your own depths, what is waiting for you at the peak, is other people, love.O'Brien, Connor Cruise (June 20, 1968). "Confessions of the Last American". The New York Review of Books. pp.16–18 . Retrieved 2018-11-07. As you would expect, the first chapter contains the set up of the novel. Any one sentence summary of the novel will reveal this aspect of the plot, so if you don’t want to know anything about the novel, please stop reading now, or forget what you are about to read. I’m not going to deal with this revelation as a spoiler. You make up your own mind whether you want to continue, but don’t read any blurb for the novel, if you’re concerned, because exactly the same fact will be revealed to you. So, here it comes… Yet again, it concerns sexuality and the relationship between the sexes. This time it’s located within a violent context. Mailer uses the crime and its aftermath to explore male sexuality and how women fit into it.

Begiebing, Robert (1980). " Armies of the Night". Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer. Columbia: U of Missouri P. pp. 141–165. ISBN 9780826203106. OCLC 466533555.Receiving praise from Alfred Kazin in The New York Times, Armies of the Night was thought to be an "appropriate and timely contribution" to "the great stage that is American democracy" because it was "so intelligent, mischievous, penetrating and alive". [31] It became the historical piece to reveal America's deepest personal and political concerns at the center of a "developing crisis". [32] Kazin went so far as to declare that the award-winning work cemented Mailer's place as the preeminent American novelist of his generation, representing a watershed achievement not only for Mailer, but also for Jews. [33]