The Time of His Time

Authors

  • Morris Dickstein City University of New York Author

Keywords:

literary introduction, twentieth-century American literature, authorial self-fashioning, literary career and reception, American cultural history

Abstract

This succinct memoir recalls the introductory remarks to Norman Mailer’s reading at Queens College in 1998, the occasion of the publication of Mailer’s The Time of Our Time. That book shows that despite all his extra-literary adventures—his political campaigns, his much-publicized feuds with other writers, his occasional tabloid notoriety, his titanic battles with feminists—Mailer’s arena of adventure has always been the sentence.

Author Biography

  • Morris Dickstein, City University of New York

    Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include a study of the 1960s, Gates of Eden (1977), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism; Leopards in the Temple (2002), a widely reviewed social history of postwar American fiction; and a collection of essays, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (Princeton, 2005; paper, 2007). His latest book is Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (W.W. Norton, 2009). In 2006–07 he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.

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Published

2026-03-14

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2009): Beyond Fiction

Section

Articles

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