An Interview with Diana Sheets

Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Two Leaders of “New Journalism” or Writers Striving to Create the “Great American Novel”?

Abstract

Reprinted from The Doubling: Those Influential Writers That Shape Our Contemporary Perceptions of Identity and Consciousness in the New Millennium (Nova Science, 2017), this interview finds Diana Sheets comparing Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe as New Journalists and as aspirants to the Great American Novel. Sheets weighs Wolfe’s case for realism against the Neo-Fabulists, the critical quarrel over A Man in Full, Mailer’s nonfiction novels The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song, their rival space-program narratives Of a Fire on the Moon and The Right Stuff, and the Internet’s effect on literary reading. An editor’s note by Jason Mosser introduces the piece.