From the Audience to the Stage: Literary Celebrity and Literary Career in Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself

Abstract

Gaining instant celebrity at the age of 25 with the huge success of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), Norman Mailer spent much of the rest of his career attempting to navigate what he called ‘a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality and status’.1 Nowhere is Mailer’s struggle to contend with the rigors of fame manifested more clearly or explored more deeply than in Advertisements for Myself, his 1959 collection of articles, essays, fiction, interviews, journalism, poetry, and autobiographical commentary. In Advertisements, Mailer elaborates upon the artistic and existential crisis caused by the public perception of him as a writer and a personality in the 1950s, as he also points up some of the impact of literary celebrity on literary career at the beginning of a period of new electronic mass communication. This chapter examines the extent to which Mailer was able to confront in Advertisements what he saw as the violence inflicted upon the individual in the literary marketplace, and it assesses in terms of its influence upon his career the author’s eventual embrace of the ‘nightmare’ (93) of the media spotlight.