Word: mailer
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...young man's autobiography did not follow the plot. Although Mailer continued to write prodigiously, he never again came close to his first great acclaim. Barbary Shore, his second novel, was a flop. His third, The Deer Park, a study of the tribal sex practices of Hollywood, was a bestseller largely because the word got around that it was dirty (it was), but the critics frowned. By the time his Advertisements for Myself-a threadbare collection of past and future projects, loosely stitched together with some narcissistic autobiographical notes-appeared, late last year, it was all too clear that...
Painful Descent. There were brief starbursts of the old craftsmanship-his essay, "The White Negro," is regarded as the definitive analysis of beatniks, and the later novels had some passages of surpassing brilliance-but the story Mailer wrote and lived was mostly a story of repeated failures. His first marriage ended in divorce. In Mexico he got on the marijuana kick; in Greenwich Village he took to Seconal and Benzedrine (he later managed to cure himself of dope). He became a fiery advocate of lost and leftist causes-an authority on hipsters, bebop, Marxism, existentialism. Once, in an excess...
...writer who thirsted for succè d'estime, it was a painful descent, and Norman Mailer was painfully aware of it ("Self-pity is one of my vices"). Soon telltale signs of instability began to appear. He quarreled with his editors, darkly accused the typesetters of deliberately mutilating his words. His second marriage, to Adele Morales, a lush Peruvian-Spanish painter and actress, fluctuated from serenity in the morning to raging public brawls at night. Usually an affable man, Mailer became morose and belligerent. In Provincetown last summer he was jailed after a fight with police that began when...
Sockless Guests. Mailer reached his Barbary Shore last week after a monumental weekend that began with a party in his West Side Manhattan apartment. The 200 guests were right out of a Mailer manuscript: poets, prizefighters, homosexuals, writers, Big Beat Allen Ginsburg, Actor Franciosa, Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz, Critic Delmore Schwartz. Syndicated Name Dropper Leonard Lyons left in a dudgeon when the sockless hipsters began to outnumber the quality folk ("I couldn't see the furniture for the beats"). The host and hostess welcomed their swarming guests in separate rooms, and as the party roared past the midnight hour...
Nearly five hours later-at 8 a.m.-Adele Mailer checked into a downtown hospital with critical wounds in her abdomen, her back and near her heart. She had fallen on some broken glass, she gasped. The doctors were dubious, but postponed further questioning until after an emergency operation. By the time Adele Mailer had recovered enough to talk to detectives, her husband was in a television studio, taping an interview with Mike Wallace. He did indeed plan to run for mayor of New York next year, he admitted-on an existentialist ticket. The problem of juvenile delinquency would...