Mailer Among the Intellectuals

Abstract

William T. Ross reviews Edward Mendelson’s Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (New York Review Books), essays on figures including Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, Saul Bellow, and Mailer that offer a glimpse of the New York Intellectuals in Mailer’s world. Ross finds the Trilling chapter excellent but its claims for Trilling’s popularity exaggerated, and praises Mendelson on the mythic qualities of Mailer’s journalism. He disputes Mendelson’s readings of the stabbing of Adele Morales and the Jack Abbott affair in light of “The White Negro,” and calls several judgments of Mailer perverse or cavalier with the evidence.