Norman Mailer: Works and Days/Bibliography/Cultural Backgrounds

This section contains many items that arguably could be better placed with the critical materials. Their location is an attempt to identify key references to the worlds (and demimondes) Mailer has moved in, sometimes with reference to him, sometimes not. This section is far from exhaustive and is more a reflection of our Mailer library than any comprehensive plan.
==A–B==
* Historical chronicle of major literary developments and critiques of the most significant post-World War II writers, including Mailer.
* Forty-two chapters on the great literary magazines and Peter Martin's detailed, annotated bibliography of 85 of them, including Big Table, Evergreen Review, Fuck You, New American Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review and Story. Definitive.
* Classic study of eight writers—John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, John P. Marquand, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, James T. Farrell and John Steinbeck—which Mailer “devoured” in college, as he explains in “Last Advertisement for Myself before the Way Out” in 59.13.
* Standard work on the subject.
* Memoir of James Jones’s writing colony in Illinois, including Mailer’s 1954 visit.
* Balanced and insightful overview of the American novel from the 1890s to the 1990s.
* The Village in the late 1940s.
* The Naked and the Dead (48.2) and Ancient Evenings (83.18) are included.
==C–F==
* Careful, detached discussion of celebrity and fame in the careers of nineteenth and twentieth century American writers, including Poe, James, Hemingway and Mailer.
* Perhaps the best collection of the work of the Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes and many others. Mailer’s “The White Negro” (57.1) is included.
* Lucid discussion of the forebears of Mailer and other 1960s autobiographical-political writers: Ben Franklin, Henry David Thoreau and Henry Adams.
* Comprehensive account of the century-long struggle against censorship. See 92.12.
* Mailer is a touchstone in this major cultural history.
* Survey of the emotional temper of the decade with extended discussions of Mailer, Budd Schulberg, Irwin Shaw, John Dos Passos, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Lionel Trilling and others.
* First anthology of the Beat writers and first to reprint “The White Negro” (57.1).
* Essays on the shift in the U.S. from “a whiskey culture to a drug culture.”
* Account of the newspaper’s movement away from its more radical origins. See 56.1–56.17.
==G–H==
* Essays on American fiction at mid-century, from Theodore Dreiser and William Faulkner to Mailer, James Jones and William Styron. See 48.3.
* Historical overview of Jewish writers and American culture, with close readings; Mailer and Abraham Cahan are the key figures.
* Benchmark examination of the New Left.
* Green’s Mailer is a Jewish Faust, epitome of 1960s New York. Rpt: Partial in Lennon (1986).
* Crisp memoir of New York in the 1950s and 1960s, with asides on Mailer.
* From the pages of the decade’s indispensable magazine, the best collection on the 1960s. Two of Mailer’s most important pieces (60.9 and 63.8) from the period are included.
* Examination of the reflection of the Vietnam War in American history, literature, film and popular culture. Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? (67.15) is discussed.
* Mailer provided an introduction to this collection of the writings of the mad genius of the counterculture. See 80.26.
* Critical survey of the most important American writing from the end of World War II through the 1970s.
* Essays on the Beat writers by their unofficial scribe.
==J–L==
* Rpt: Partial in Adams (1974). Pioneering study.
* Select bibliography and outline of American literature in its intellectual, social and cultural contexts.
* Comprehensive study of World War II novels, including those by Mailer, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, James Gould Cozzens and Kurt Vonnegut.
* The debates and dilemmas of the cultural elites. Fine opening chapter on the 1949 Waldorf conference.
* Contains chapters on the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union and Japan. The Naked and the Dead (48.2) is given careful analysis, especially the “uneasy” liberalism of Lt. Hearn.
* One of the best collections on this topic to date. Includes Mailer’s 1965 address to the Modern Language Association. See 66.5.
* Major study by our finest postwar critic.
* Rich collection of Kazin’s reviews and essays from the 1940s through the early 1960s including his review of Advertisements for Myself (59.13).
* Most comprehensive collection of its kind, extending from Daniel Defoe and Jack London through Mailer, Michael Herr and Rosemary Mahoney.
* The roots of American radicalism and a critique of “the isolation of American intellectuals, as a class, from the main currents of American life.” Mailer is the chief whipping boy.
* Full reproduction of 70 of George Lois’s covers for Esquire in the 1960s and 1970s, with commentary. See 71.27.
==M–N==
* Political essays and reports by an iconoclastic critic, including a memoir of Macdonald’s debate on Russia with Mailer at Mt. Holyoke College in the winter of 1952. See 52.0, 60.8, 83.57.
* Nineteen original critical essays on fiction dealing with dream and nightmare themes, including Ihab Hassan’s essay on Why Are We in Vietnam? (67.15).
* One of the best collections on these writers, including both general essays and individual appreciations of Mailer, Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, I.B. Singer, Leslie Fiedler and others, with an extensive bibliography.
* Standard history.
* Collection of key historical articles and essays on the Beat movement by a veteran Village Voice photographer, with 190 of his photographs.
* A history of The Village Voice, Mailer's discovery of his talent for journalism. Also includes a background on Mailer's relationship with Jean Malaquais and Dan Wolf.
* Feminist critique of Mailer, D.H. Lawrence, Sigmund Freud, Henry Miller and others. Mailer responded in The Prisoner of Sex (71.20).
* Elegant study of American novelists from 1887 to the late 1950s, including Mailer.
* See 54.1.
* One of the earliest collections of literary journalism, with useful prefatory matter.
* 
==P–R==
* Essays on British, continental and American novelists, including Mailer, with an important introduction by John W. Aldridge.
* Memoir by Partisan Review’s long-time editor. See 52.1, 68.4.
* Contains Alfred Kazin’s important introduction, “The Jew as Modern American Writer,” and many other significant essays. See 62.22, 68.4.
* The serial publication of An American Dream (64.2–64.9) is but one strand in this history, which focuses on editor Harold Hayes.
* Memoir of the counterculture in the 1960s, including the rise and fall of the SDS. See 72.18.
* Contains the most important essays of Rahv, a long-time editor of Partisan Review, including those from his influential 1949 collection, Image and Idea, and his review of An American Dream (65.7).
* Argument for the synchronicity of literary theory and political action via an examination of writings by Mailer, James Agee, Ralph Ellison and others.
* Still the finest critical survey of these novels, including Mailer’s first two.
==S–T==
* Comprehensive and stimulating historical overview.
* History of Harvard, focusing on five of its greatest presidents.
* Solid collection of literary journalism about Mailer and his contemporaries: Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, William Burroughs, Seymour Krim and others.
* Ambivalent attitudes to technology in the writings of Mailer, Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy.
* The finest twentieth-century British critic of American fiction examines the work of 25 novelists, including Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag, Ken Kesey, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. His chapter on Mailer, “On the Parapet,” is unlikely to be surpassed. Rpt: Partial in Adams (1974), Bloom (1986).
* The origins of the Beat sensibility in the culture of the 1950s.
==V–W==
* Early and excellent overview of the New Left’s involvement in the anti-war movement, including Mailer’s.
* New York City during the decade in which American society began its transmogrification.
* Account of Wakefield’s trip around the United States and his assessment of a nation moving deeper into the Vietnam War.
* Early and valuable anthology of 26 reprinted pieces that debate the New Journalism.
* Based on interviews with all seven.
* The editors’ selections are as important as Wolfe’s apology for literary journalism and his attack on the contemporary novel.
* The first anthology of essays and columns from the Voice, including several of Mailer’s, and Kenneth Tynan’s review of Advertisements for Myself (59.13). See 56.1–56.17.
* Standard biography of Mailer’s longtime friend (1949 to 1983), which includes accounts of the 1949 Waldorf conference and the 1968 march on the Pentagon. See 49.1.