Morbid Symptoms

Barbary Shore

Abstract

In an interview with the New York Star in August 1948, Norman Mailer, the bestselling author of The Naked and the Dead (1948), announced “a change in his politics.” Mailer was at this time unsure of the direction his writing should take: “I was full of second-novel panic,” he was later to write in Advertisements for Myself. Meanwhile, however, Mailer had begun to study Marx and Engels and the history of the Russian Revolution under the influence of the Polish intellectual Jean Malaquais. This engagement with Marxism profoundly shaped Barbary Shore (1951), Mailer’s second novel. Barbary Shore establishes a necessary project of recuperation and recapitulation of Mailer’s political concerns. By reformulating and, in a sense, exorcising the accumulated historical burden of left-wing radical thought in Barbary Shore, Mailer prepares the ground for his own radical politics, which he will articulate clearly for the first time in his most important nonfiction work of the 1960s, Advertisements for Myself (1960).