The Mailer Review is a scholarly journal devoted to the study of the life, work, and cultural significance of Norman Mailer. Since its founding, the journal has served as a forum for critical scholarship, archival research, and interpretive engagement with Mailer’s writing and with the literary, political, and cultural contexts in which it emerged.
Copyright (c) 2026 Francis Blessington (Author)
Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway Do Not Box in Heaven
Copyright (c) 2026 Nicholas Samaras (Author)
Copyright (c) 2026 Robbin Martinelli (Author)
Copyright (c) 2026 Daniele Pantano (Author)
Review of 1959: The Year that Changed Everything by Fred Kaplan. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009.
Copyright (c) 2026 William T. Ross (Author)
Review of Fighters and Writers by John G. Rodwan, Jr. Norman, OK: Mongrel Empire Press, 2010.
Review of A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer. New York: Random House, Inc., 2010.
An interview with Norris Church Mailer discussing her relationship with Norman Mailer.
twentieth-century American literary culture
One of the achievements of The Armies of the Night is that Norman Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage.
Copyright (c) 2026 Katharine Westaway (Author)
Norman Mailer’s ostensibly realist text in The Naked and the Dead is complicated by its depiction of mechanical soldiers who are plagued with superstitions regarding death and filled with dread provoked by an oddly menacing environment. This conscious use of the uncanny illustrates popular postwar concerns connected with conformity and totalitarianism, but the real strangeness of The Naked and the Dead relies on its ability to reveal unconscious fears connected with Mailer’s personal uncertainties regarding his writing and cultural unease about the atomic bomb.
Harlot’s Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway
Harlot’s Ghost is the Bildungsroman of the education of Harry Hubbard. It is a novel of protagonist Harry Hubbard’s psychological, moral and social shaping in the course of his journey from youth—adolescence in Harry’s case—to a degree of consolidation of adulthood. Harlot also is a picaresque of that same education. Harry’s development as a man is marked mainly by his armoring himself against dangers, not by Harry initiating or escalating aggression. To draw on Hemingway, Harry’s "manly development” brings more of the grace under pressure of early Hemingway characters like Nick Adams and Jack Barnes than of the occasional public belligerence of the late Papa, or of the middle-aged Mailer.
Copyright (c) 2026 Alexander Hicks (Author)
With Advertisements for Myself, Norman Mailer established an influential foundation in his critique of fellow authors. Additionally, he secured his role as a contributor to the literary marketplace by way of his praise of other works. In over half a century, Norman Mailer composed approximately one hundred and forty blurbs for books on a bevy of subjects. From Hemingway to heavyweight champions, from conspiracy theories to Italian cooking, Mailer has, through his blurbs, shown great generosity to fellow writers, commented on a variety of topics, revealed several personal interests, and developed a poetry of promotion.
Copyright (c) 2026 Matthew S. Hinton (Author)
Cancer is a recurring theme in Mailer’s fiction. He believed that malignancy begins with a single defective cell that attacks a healthy body from inside. Mailer believed that spontaneous action requires courage, a feeling synonymous with guts and bravery and audacity. He also believed that the failure to act, or the failure of a courageous attempt to act, causes cancer.
Copyright (c) 2026 Maureen O’Neill Hooker (Author)
Style, Politics, and Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.
What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat
A memoir of an encounter with Norman Mailer in the 1980s.
A description of the complications and effects of reading Norman Mailer when one is very young.
A professor recounts Norman Mailer’s role as Ernest Hemingway in a dramatic performance in reading personal correspondence, which included George Plimpton as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norris Church Mailer as Zelda Fitzgerald.
Copyright (c) 2026 Gail D. Sinclair (Author)
Norman Mailer spoke to a crowd at the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1972, toward the end of the Nixon-McGovern campaign. It was a memorable evening, raucous and rowdy, as his speech was heckled and disrupted frequently. In 1986, Mailer came to the University of Florida in Gainesville in February 1986 to give a talk entitled “The Art of Writing.” In 1972, it was one of the tempestuous Nixon years: the Vietnam War was still raging, the country was facing an election, and Mailer confronted vociferous protesters. In contrast to that wild evening, by 1986 it was the quiescent Reagan era, the tranquilized Eighties. The times were tamer, and Mailer too had aged and mellowed.
Copyright (c) 2026 Andrew Gordon (Author)
A confidant of Norman Mailer recounts his experiences with Mailer over many years.
Copyright (c) 2026 Thomas Jacomo (Author)
A longtime friend recounts his memories of Norman Mailer over the past half century.
Copyright (c) 2026 H. R. Stoneback (Author)
An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works.
Copyright (c) 2026 J’aimé L. Sanders (Author)
In both Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, their rhetoric announces a beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by nada, signaled in Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative “make sense of life.” Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true.
Copyright (c) 2026 Raymond M. Vince (Author)
Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead
Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead illustrate the narrative engagement of traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.
Copyright (c) 2026 Kathleen "Kat" Robinson (Author)
Nostalgia is a contested word that evokes numerous, often conflicting, definitions, but most often implies a simplistic, romantic look at the past. Nostalgia is a central component in enabling individuals to create worldviews, while also discovering ways to maneuver within society. From this viewpoint, nostalgia can enlighten and provide nuance as one interprets the past. Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway use nostalgia in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls as a literary technique to add additional interpretive layers to their fiction. These authors expand on the term and demonstrate its potential in advancing historical insight.
Copyright (c) 2026 Bob Batchelor (Author)
Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman
Hemingway and Mailer had many similarities. In the cases of Catherine Barkley for Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe for Mailer, both writers allowed themselves for imaginative privileges that they did not have in life. Both characterizations are a certain kind of dream fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses. Whereas life may not have afforded either Hemingway or Mailer the realization of some of their fantasies, as authors, they can, to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, be “masters of their own domain.”
Copyright (c) 2026 Mimi R. Gladstein (Author)
Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise
Hemingway was Mailer’s Oedipal father, the elder to look up, to imitate, and to destroy. No one ever accused Mailer of lockjaw, but did he not also campaign to become the personality of his time as writer, political commentator, candidate for office, and—that role he mocks Hemingway for—celebrity? His style as a mature writer was not Hemingway’s—it was not sparse—but his style as a self-campaigner certainly outdid his model. In that regard, he was a champ.
Mailer's “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”
If Norman Mailer, in The Bullfight, is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well as Hemingway. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration Mailer was more like El Loco, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he was able to make the same important connection between torero and writer that Hemingway had made.
Copyright (c) 2026 Allen Josephs (Author)
Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself
Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer each strove to achieve lasting success and power as novelists, yet two of their most revealing and thus interesting works in no way qualify as novels. These works, Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Advertisements for Myself (1959), occur at almost precisely the same point in their careers—after initial critical success for quasi-autobiographical war novels, after the consequent achievement of celebrity, and after a major disappointment when that celebrity alone was not enough to overcome the restrictive vicissitudes of their respective moments in publishing culture. Their stances in response to the writer/author alienation would initially differ thus: Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway, embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.
Copyright (c) 2026 Hilary K. Justice (Author)
Hemingway’s suicidal shadows reinforced the literary truism that Mailer was Papa’s heir apparent for the postwar generation. In 1948 Hemingway was revisited in the guise of The Naked and the Dead. Both men abided by the Neo-Primitive, a distrust of civilization and complication, a demand that man shift to the natural and simple and go back to the tough-guy earth.
Copyright (c) 2026 Donald L. Kaufmann (Author)