Norman Mailer and Joseph Ellis

Unsettling Dialogues on Democracy

Abstract

Late in life, Mailer opened a final dialogue with his compatriots when he published two nonfiction books on American politics and democracy—Why Are We at War? and The Big Empty. It is striking how Mailer returns in these late nonfiction works to many of the questions the founding fathers and mothers faced in the eighteenth century. By 2018 American citizens had come to believe that our democracy was in crisis. Into that crisis, historian Joseph Ellis extended the Founders’ dialogues to us in American Dialogue: The Founders and Us. Mailer and Ellis cover much similar territory as they awaken us to our democratic fundamentals by both considering our fragile democracy, our economic inequality, and our foreign policy.