Frank D. McConnell
Literary critic and professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara; author of Four Postwar American Novelists (1977), whose Mailer chapter, Norman Mailer and the Cutting Edge of Style, is reprinted here in full.
Frank D. McConnell (1942–1999) taught English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was a professor at his death in January 1999, and was for many years the media critic of Commonweal. His Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth, and Pynchon (University of Chicago Press, 1977) gives a chapter to each writer; the Mailer chapter, “Norman Mailer and the Cutting Edge of Style,” reads the five novels and The Armies of the Night as a continued experiment with style and is reprinted here complete, by permission of Celeste (McConnell) Barber. His other books include The Spoken Seen: Film and the Romantic Imagination (1975), Storytelling and Mythmaking (1979), and The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells (1981).