Abstract
Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984) has often been dismissed as an example of formulaic pulp fiction that is unworthy of serious critical attention. However, it is also a novel that provides a useful index to popular attitudes and moral positioning with regard to obscenity, violence, and other forms of behavior. In Mailer's hands, the new reality of the late twentieth century is shown to include a criminal turn in American popular culture; this turn has had the effect of decriminalizing a substantial portion of activities that for previous generations had been considered as vices. In this way, Tough Guys Don't Dance serves as an extremely revealing cultural barometer, one that has the capacity for providing a narrative index to a significant transformation of popular taste and morality.
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