Word: mailer
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Mills's technique works particularly well in the chapter on Mailer's much-publicized arguments with feminist leaders. Attacked for caustic comments up to and including "Women should be kept in cages" (on an Orson Welles talk show), Mailer maintains that it's harder for women to be feminine after the technological advances. Mills quotes him pleading with women not to "quit the womb." Abbie Hoffman says Mailer "sees feminism as the decline of civilization" but describes how Mailer's own social habits counter his chauvinistic image. But Mills also quotes Germaine Greer, who said Mailer "pushed himself into...
Similarly, Mills doesn't resolve the paradox of Mailer's belief in the necessity for personal violence (as reflected in his interest in boxing) and his anti-war activism, but she offers speculation as to how the two sides developed and how they can coexist in Mailer...
...Mailer's subject matter provides a considerable sociological analysis. His insightful 1957 essay "The White Negro" is a prophetic vision of the hip consciousness that would develop in the next decade. Mailer said that the specter of the atom bomb and the fear of our collective death produced "the American hipster" who was predominantly religious and dealt with the fears "by seeking out the rebellious imperatives of the self." This piece also marked the beginning of Mailer's preoccupation with the New Left, which not only influenced radicals like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin but also involved him personally...
SUCH HISTORICAL BACKGROUND combines easily with the biography because Mailer's own writing was always reflecting the character of the country. Working for numerous magazines, he covered John F. Kennedy '40 and the space program, the 1968 and 1972 Presidential conventions. His response to his feminist detractors, The Prisoner of Sex, originally appeared in Harper's magazine. As Mills says of his Armies of the Night, Mailer's report of the march on the Pentagon...
...Mailer had managed to encompass the spectrum or American sensibility within himself. It was a sensibility that only the most expansive, sensitive and egotistical of American writers could claim to possess...