November 10, 2007 Archives

I was not fortunate enough to be alive during the Norman Mailer heyday of the 1960s and early 1970s, when his writing on the American scene—from electoral politics to boxing to the space program to the Vietnam war and its discontents—appeared regularly in periodicals. His work was a heady match for his times, and he seemed to know it all along: if any writer was going to account for that American era, it had to be one with enough soaring intelligence, bravura aesthetic daring, and straight-up end-of-the-world cockiness to take on the wild currents of American life and make 'em make sense. Mailer did it—not with equal success in every moment, but he did it.