Norman Mailer, Discursive Artist

Abstract

Norman Mailer is clearly one of the most eclectic writers of the past century and the beginning of the current one. Further, he was a public intellectual—indeed, a towering figure—as a voice that commanded attention across deep and broad spectra of media. His ubiquitous presence over many decades on the airwaves and print medium left no doubt that he was a mind and personality that engaged the public more than any other writer of his generation. A critically strategic dimension of his public intellectuality was his discursive prose: a masterly poetics of the art of the essay. Norman Mailer was and is the governing “literary” essayist of the second half of the twentieth century.