“The Old Literary Idea of Oneself as a Major Writer”: Norman Mailer, “Norman Mailer,” and the Changing Cultural Landscape

Abstract

“I was a node in a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality, and status,” Norman Mailer wrote in 1959, describing the literary renown he earned after the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, a decade earlier (AFM 92). As a participant in that landscape, he both embraced and rebelled against his role; as an observer of it, he aimed to make sense of the individual’s place in an increasingly corporation-oriented monolithic society. For Mailer, as for many writers working in the United States after World War II, the self-conscious turn inward to explore the connections between his personality and his public reputation became an essential aspect of the literary project of understanding the forces working for and against individual expression in postmodern American culture.