Word: mailer
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...with a book he had written in 15 months, Mailer was famous. Sinclair Lewis called him the greatest writer of his generation. Mailer was a comer, the odds-on favorite for the title, but he seemed to have drained himself too early.) The only book he was now equipped to write, he remarked, was "The Naked and the Dead Go to Japan." But the mark of the great, or the would-be great, is that they can't do the same thing twice. Both of Mailer's next two novels, Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, struck out with...
...revision of Deer Park's galleys was excruciating for him, and intense personal unhappiness, as well as the popular rejection of his work, convinced him that it was better to continue the campaign in other genres. "The shits are killing us," Mailer wrote bitterly, "even as they kill themselves." Better, then, to hammer the nails into the coffin directly than through the subtlety of fiction. Better, too, to give the heathens a guided tour than to lose them in the intricate patterns of one's thoughts. Best to wage total warfare, to offer open assault on a society which would...
With his literary criticism and political essays, Mailer hit his stride as a phrase-maker; even his erstwhile debating opponent, William F. Buckley, calls him the most quotable writer of our time. Mailer dismissed Salinger as "the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school," said that Scranton's wheeler-dealers at the Republican convention "stood by idle wheels," and labelled Lyndon Johnson "the bully with an Air Force...
Johnson is Mailer's political obsession; his speech about LBJ at Berkeley last summer was cut off by the university radio station after ten minutes. Johnson, he said, invented the war to satisfy the rednecks who wanted to kill gooks, giving him an alternative to continued support of the civil rights movement. "Yes, thought the President," Mailer drawled, "his friends and associates were correct in their estimate of him as a genius. Hot damn. Vietnam. The President felt like the only stud in a whorehouse on a houseboat...
...last few years, Mailer has proved himself equal to the task of taking on the literary and political world. His review of Mary McCarthy's The Group was devastating, and his piece on LBJ's Hope For America is a classic of literary demolition. He even dedicated Cannibals and Christians to Johnson, "whose name inspired young men to cheer for me in public...