How Mailer Became "Mailer"

The Writer as Private and Public Character

Authors

  • Morris Dickstein City University of New York Author

Keywords:

American literature, Authorial persona, Literary celebrity , New Journalism, Postwar American culture, Literature and politics, Autobiography and self-representation

Abstract

Mailer has been our most protean writer, remarkably consistent in his themes yet always surprising in the ways he finds to pursue them, beginning with his own inimitable style. In choosing his subjects he was like a riverboat gambler restless for risk; each new venture depended on bold strokes that could as soon fail as succeed. Strategies that worked well would never be exactly repeated. Invariably he was engaging the moment, never writing for the uniform edition.

Author Biography

  • Morris Dickstein, City University of New York

    Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a senior fellow of the Center for the Humanities, which he founded in 1993. His books include a study of the 1960s, Gates of Eden (1977), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and Leopards in the Temple (2002), a widely reviewed social history of postwar American fiction. His latest book is a collection of essays, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (Princeton, 2005; paper, 2007). He is currently serving as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics and completing a cultural history of the United States in the 1930s.

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Published

2026-01-25

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2007): Inaugural Issue

Section

Articles