Mailer Expunged; Mailer Restored
Keywords:
Maggie McKinley, Understanding Norman Mailer, literary reputation, academic canon, censorshipAbstract
Robert J. Begiebing reviews Maggie McKinley’s Understanding Norman Mailer (University of South Carolina Press), a volume in the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series that assesses Mailer’s sixty-year career in under 120 pages of text. Begiebing praises McKinley’s concise, largely jargon-free survey of Mailer’s themes, her reading of his work as an evolving process rather than a set of finished artifacts, and her lively chapter on war, women, politics, and film, and he presents the book as an antidote to Mailer’s exclusion from academic anthologies.