Mr. Mailer Tells a Tale Of Love, Art, Corruption

Authors

  • Malcolm Cowley Author

Keywords:

The Deer Park, contemporary reception, art and corruption, Hollywood and the blacklist, Sergius O’Shaughnessy, Malcolm Cowley

Abstract

A reprint of Malcolm Cowley’s review of The Deer Park, first published in the New York Herald Tribune on October 23, 1955. Cowley traces the novel’s intersecting arcs of the blacklisted director Charles Eitel, who sells out his art, and the young flyer Sergius O’Shaughnessy, who resists the same temptations. He calls the book a serious and recklessly honest novel about art, love, and corruption, finds its sexual episodes the dullest portions, judges it a real advance over The Naked and the Dead, and ranks Mailer among the most talented writers of his generation.

Author Biography

  • Malcolm Cowley

    Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) was an American novelist, poet, and literary critic who, along with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Edmund Wilson, shaped the artistic sensibilities of America’s Lost Generation. After covering the World War I Western Front for The Pittsburgh Gazette, Cowley joined other expatriate authors in Paris and later became an important chronicler of that artistic collective. As an editor for Viking Press and, later, The New Republic, Cowley promoted and edited works by Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Jack Kerouac. Cowley’s own works included the influential collection of poetry, Blue Juniata (1929), Exile’s Return (1934), perhaps the most complete examination of his Lost Generation literary contemporaries, and the autobiographical And I Worked at the Writer’s Trade, winner of a 1980 American Book Award. Cowley edited many of the most distinguished author collections in Viking’s Portable series, and was honored, postmortem, with his own collection, The Portable Malcolm Cowley (1990), edited by Donald Faulkner.

Downloads

Published

2015-09-30

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 1 (2015): Maestro

Section

Classic Interpretations

How to Cite

Cowley, Malcolm. “Mr. Mailer Tells a Tale Of Love, Art, Corruption”. The Mailer Review, vol. 9, no. 1, Sept. 2015, pp. 245–246, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/526.