The Mailer Legacy and Aleatory Burroughs

Authors

  • Donald L. Kaufmann University of South Florida Author

Keywords:

literary postmodernism, Beat Generation, aleatory narrative, experimental prose, countercultural literature, media and textuality

Abstract

William S. Burroughs, born nearly a decade before Norman Mailer, created unorthodox, airy random literary nuggets that marked him as a serious literary deconstructionist, yet his seminal importance to Mailer is undeniable. The Burroughs’s legacy breach was more extreme and subtle than nearly any other literary figure. To seasoned readers of Mailer, Burroughs’s legacy connection is clear.

Author Biography

  • Donald L. Kaufmann, University of South Florida

    Donald L. Kaufmann is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of South Florida, where he has taught American literature and creative writing since coming to USF from the University of Alaska in 1965. He is the author of Norman Mailer: The Countdown: The First Twenty Years (Southern Illinois UP, 1969), one of the first two books to appear on the work of Norman Mailer. He has also published essays on Mailer, Updike, Bellow, Hemingway, and other twentieth-century American writers. Prof. Kaufmann holds one of the largest Mailer collections of books, stories, essays, memorabilia, and ephemera.

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Published

2026-10-09

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 1 (2012): Why Mailer Matters

Section

Articles