The Mailer Review
type: channel
description: 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.
publisher: The Norman Mailer Society
language: en
publication name: The Mailer Review
issn: 1936-4679
items: The Boxer in the Park
items: Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway Do Not Box in Heaven
items: From Where The Rivers Come
items: Mailer & Hemingway
items: 1959: One of Mailer’s Years
items: All You Need is Glove
items: Norris Church Mailer
items: Inside Norman Mailer
items: “A Noble Pursuit”
items: Automatons and the Atomic Abyss
items: Harlot’s Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway
items: Advertisements for Others
items: Norman Mailer
items: Style, Politics, and Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
items: What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat
items: On Reading Mailer Too Young
items: Encounters with Mailer
items: Sparring with Norman
items: “Oohh Normie—You’re Sooo Hemingway”
items: Death, Art, and the Disturbing
items: Rumors of Grace
items: Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead
items: Looking at the Past
items: Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman
items: Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise
items: Mailer's “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”
items: Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself
items: Norman and Ernest (Exit Music)

The Boxer in the Park
type: item
subject: Creative Works
  topic: section
subject: poetic tribute
  topic: keywords
subject: boxing imagery
  topic: keywords
subject: performance and identity
  topic: keywords
subject: aging and physicality
  topic: keywords
subject: masculinity and struggle
  topic: keywords
subject: metaphor of the boxer
  topic: keywords
creator: Francis Blessington
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Francis Blessington (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 541
ending page: 541

Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway Do Not Box in Heaven
type: item
subject: Creative Works
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: poetic tribute
  topic: keywords
subject: afterlife and imagination
  topic: keywords
subject: literary friendship
  topic: keywords
subject: aging and legacy
  topic: keywords
subject: masculinity and reflection
  topic: keywords
subject: writers in conversation
  topic: keywords
creator: Nicholas Samaras
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Nicholas Samaras (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 540
ending page: 540

From Where The Rivers Come
type: item
subject: Creative Works
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: poetic homage
  topic: keywords
subject: literary allusion
  topic: keywords
subject: death and artistic struggle
  topic: keywords
subject: masculinity and courage
  topic: keywords
subject: modernist influence
  topic: keywords
subject: symbolic imagery
  topic: keywords
creator: Robbin Martinelli
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Robbin Martinelli (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 536
ending page: 539

Mailer & Hemingway
type: item
subject: Creative Works
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: experimental prose
  topic: keywords
subject: surrealism in literature
  topic: keywords
subject: fragmented narrative
  topic: keywords
subject: literary allusion
  topic: keywords
subject: symbolic imagery
  topic: keywords
creator: Daniele Pantano
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Daniele Pantano (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 534
ending page: 535

1959: One of Mailer’s Years
type: item
description: Review of 1959: The Year that Changed Everything by Fred Kaplan. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009.
subject: Book Reviews
  topic: section
subject: Advertisements for Myself
  topic: keywords
subject: 1950s American Culture
  topic: keywords
subject: literary self-fashioning
  topic: keywords
subject: postmodernism and authorship
  topic: keywords
subject: high and mass culture
  topic: keywords
subject: Beat Generation
  topic: keywords
creator: William Ross
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 William T. Ross (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 530
ending page: 533

All You Need is Glove
type: item
description: Review of Fighters and Writers by John G. Rodwan, Jr. Norman, OK: Mongrel Empire Press, 2010.
subject: Book Reviews
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: boxing and literature
  topic: keywords
subject: masculinity and violence
  topic: keywords
subject: sports journalism
  topic: keywords
subject: literary culture and identity
  topic: keywords
subject: boxing metaphors in literature
  topic: keywords
creator: Sal Cetrano
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Sal Cetrano (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 521
ending page: 529

Norris Church Mailer
type: item
description: Review of A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer. New York: Random House, Inc., 2010.
subject: Book Reviews
  topic: section
subject: literary biography
  topic: keywords
subject: literary memoir
  topic: keywords
subject: marriage and literary life
  topic: keywords
subject: Southern identity in literature
  topic: keywords
subject: women writers and authorship
  topic: keywords
subject: American literary culture
  topic: keywords
creator: John Bowers
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 John Bowers (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 514
ending page: 520

Inside Norman Mailer
type: item
subject: Classic Interpretations
  topic: section
subject: literary satire
  topic: keywords
subject: authorial persona
  topic: keywords
subject: boxing metaphors in literature
  topic: keywords
subject: literary rivalry
  topic: keywords
subject: literary influence
  topic: keywords
subject: metafiction
  topic: keywords
subject: American postmodern literature
  topic: keywords
creator: Max Apple
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Max Apple (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 504
ending page: 513

Norris Church Mailer
type: item
description: An interview with Norris Church Mailer discussing her relationship with Norman Mailer.
subject: Interviews
  topic: section
subject: literary marriage
  topic: keywords
subject: author interviews
  topic: keywords
subject: literary biography
  topic: keywords
subject: writers' families
  topic: keywords
subject: twentieth-century American literary culture
  topic: keywords
subject: memoir and personal narrative
  topic: keywords
creator: Sue Fox
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Sue Fox (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 495
ending page: 503

“A Noble Pursuit”
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: The Armies of the Night
  topic: keywords
subject: Vietnam War protests
  topic: keywords
subject: March on the Pentagon (1967)
  topic: keywords
subject: anti-war movement
  topic: keywords
subject: civil disobedience
  topic: keywords
subject: politics and the novel
  topic: keywords
creator: Katharine Westaway
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Katharine Westaway (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 483
ending page: 494

Automatons and the Atomic Abyss
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: The Naked and the Dead
  topic: keywords
subject: the uncanny in literature
  topic: keywords
subject: mechanization and dehumanization
  topic: keywords
subject: atomic age anxiety
  topic: keywords
subject: World War II literature
  topic: keywords
subject: conformity and Cold War culture
  topic: keywords
subject: technology and warfare
  topic: keywords
creator: Erin Mercer
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Erin Mercer (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 471
ending page: 482

Harlot’s Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: Harlot’s Ghost
  topic: keywords
subject: masculinity in literature
  topic: keywords
subject: male identity and development
  topic: keywords
subject: CIA fiction and espionage narrative
  topic: keywords
subject: American literary influence
  topic: keywords
creator: Alexander Hicks
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Alexander Hicks (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 462
ending page: 470

Advertisements for Others
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: book blurbs and literary endorsements
  topic: keywords
subject: literary marketplace
  topic: keywords
subject: author networks and influence
  topic: keywords
subject: twentieth-century American publishing
  topic: keywords
subject: writer relationships
  topic: keywords
subject: American literary culture
  topic: keywords
subject: literary promotion
  topic: keywords
creator: Matthew Hinton
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Matthew S. Hinton (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 452
ending page: 461

Norman Mailer
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: cancer and psychology
  topic: keywords
subject: stress and disease
  topic: keywords
subject: mind-body medicine
  topic: keywords
subject: schizophrenia and cancer
  topic: keywords
subject: orgone accumulator
  topic: keywords
subject: emotion and illness
  topic: keywords
creator: Maureen Hooker
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Maureen O’Neill Hooker (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 445
ending page: 451

Style, Politics, and Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: Spanish Civil War
  topic: keywords
subject: war correspondence
  topic: keywords
subject: journalism and propaganda
  topic: keywords
subject: narrative journalism
  topic: keywords
subject: eyewitness reporting
  topic: keywords
subject: twentieth-century war reporting
  topic: keywords
creator: Alex Vernon
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Alex Vernon (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 427
ending page: 444

What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat
type: item
description: A memoir of an encounter with Norman Mailer in the 1980s.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: literary mentorship
  topic: keywords
subject: literary influence
  topic: keywords
subject: aspiring writers
  topic: keywords
subject: literary encounters
  topic: keywords
subject: women writers and authorship
  topic: keywords
subject: artistic ambition
  topic: keywords
subject: literary memoir
  topic: keywords
creator: Erin Miele
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Erin Miele (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 420
ending page: 426

On Reading Mailer Too Young
type: item
description: A description of the complications and effects of reading Norman Mailer when one is very young.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: The Naked and the Dead
  topic: keywords
subject: reading and literary influence
  topic: keywords
subject: youth and literary discovery
  topic: keywords
subject: war fiction
  topic: keywords
subject: masculinity in literature
  topic: keywords
subject: popular culture and literature
  topic: keywords
creator: Ross Klavan
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Ross Klavan (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 413
ending page: 419

Norman Mailer
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: literary performance
  topic: keywords
subject: Lost Generation writers
  topic: keywords
subject: literary correspondence
  topic: keywords
subject: American modernist literature
  topic: keywords
subject: author impersonation
  topic: keywords
creator: Gail Sinclair
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Gail D. Sinclair (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 408
ending page: 412

Encounters with Mailer
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: literary encounter
  topic: keywords
subject: public speaking
  topic: keywords
subject: campus literary culture
  topic: keywords
subject: literary reputation
  topic: keywords
subject: writers and politics
  topic: keywords
subject: boxing and masculinity
  topic: keywords
subject: American literary memoir
  topic: keywords
creator: Andrew Gordon
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Andrew Gordon (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 396
ending page: 407

Sparring with Norman
type: item
description: A confidant of Norman Mailer recounts his experiences with Mailer over many years.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: boxing and writers
  topic: keywords
subject: literary friendship
  topic: keywords
subject: author anecdotes
  topic: keywords
subject: sports and literature
  topic: keywords
subject: writer personality
  topic: keywords
subject: American literary culture
  topic: keywords
subject: literary memoir
  topic: keywords
creator: Thomas Jacomo
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Thomas Jacomo (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 393
ending page: 395

“Oohh Normie—You’re Sooo Hemingway”
type: item
description: A longtime friend recounts his memories of Norman Mailer over the past half century.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: literary memoir
  topic: keywords
subject: author encounters
  topic: keywords
subject: literary reputation
  topic: keywords
subject: American literary culture
  topic: keywords
subject: twentieth-century literary history
  topic: keywords
creator: H. Stoneback
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 H. R. Stoneback (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 371
ending page: 391

Death, Art, and the Disturbing
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: An American Dream
  topic: keywords
subject: existentialism
  topic: keywords
subject: death and artistic philosophy
  topic: keywords
subject: violence and authenticity
  topic: keywords
subject: existential psychology
  topic: keywords
subject: art of writing
  topic: keywords
creator: J’aimé Sanders
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 J’aimé L. Sanders (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 351
ending page: 370

Rumors of Grace
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: religion and literature
  topic: keywords
subject: God-language in fiction
  topic: keywords
subject: modernism
  topic: keywords
subject: grace and transcendence
  topic: keywords
subject: existentialism
  topic: keywords
creator: Raymond Vince
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Raymond M. Vince (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 331
ending page: 350

Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: The Naked and the Dead
  topic: keywords
subject: war trauma in literature
  topic: keywords
subject: World War II fiction
  topic: keywords
subject: narrative structure
  topic: keywords
subject: trauma and narrative perspective
  topic: keywords
creator: Kathleen Robinson
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Kathleen "Kat" Robinson (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 311
ending page: 330

Looking at the Past
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: The Naked and the Dead
  topic: keywords
subject: nostalgia as literary technique
  topic: keywords
subject: memory and the past
  topic: keywords
subject: narrative structure
  topic: keywords
subject: twentieth-century American war fiction
  topic: keywords
creator: Bob Batchelor
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Bob Batchelor (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 303
ending page: 310

Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman
type: item
description: 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.”
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: Marilyn Monroe
  topic: keywords
subject: masculinity and sexuality in literature
  topic: keywords
subject: autoerotic fantasy in fiction
  topic: keywords
subject: feminist literary criticism
  topic: keywords
creator: Mimi Gladstein
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Mimi R. Gladstein (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 288
ending page: 302

Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: literary rivalry
  topic: keywords
subject: literary legacy
  topic: keywords
subject: boxing metaphors in literature
  topic: keywords
subject: authorial persona
  topic: keywords
subject: literary celebrity
  topic: keywords
subject: masculinity and literary competition
  topic: keywords
creator: Peter Hays
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Peter Hays (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 286
ending page: 287

Mailer's “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: bullfighting in literature
  topic: keywords
subject: literary influence
  topic: keywords
subject: literary rivalry
  topic: keywords
subject: writer and torero metaphor
  topic: keywords
subject: masculinity and spectacle
  topic: keywords
subject: The Bullfight
  topic: keywords
creator: Allen Josephs
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Allen Josephs (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 273
ending page: 285

Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: Advertisements for Myself
  topic: keywords
subject: authorship and alienation
  topic: keywords
subject: literary celebrity
  topic: keywords
subject: genre hybridity
  topic: keywords
subject: authorial identity
  topic: keywords
creator: Hilary Justice
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Hilary K. Justice (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 259
ending page: 272

Norman and Ernest (Exit Music)
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Ernest Hemingway
  topic: keywords
subject: literary influence and legacy
  topic: keywords
subject: masculinity in literature
  topic: keywords
subject: American literary canon
  topic: keywords
subject: authorial voice
  topic: keywords
subject: twentieth-century American literature
  topic: keywords
subject: literary rivalry
  topic: keywords
creator: Donald Kaufmann
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Donald L. Kaufmann (Author)
date: 2026-03-25
publication date: 2026-03-25
starting page: 243
ending page: 258