Why Mailer Matters
J. Michael Lennon's three-part case for Mailer, given at the 2011 Mailer–Jones Conference at the Harry Ransom Center: the innovator of participatory journalism, the leading public intellectual of American letters for thirty years, and the chief chronicler of American life in the second half of the century.
J. Michael Lennon. “Why Mailer Matters.” Talk, Mailer–Jones Conference, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 10 November 2011. Project Mailer, https://projectmailer.net/pm/Why_Mailer_Matters.
A short talk in three numbered parts, opening on the claim that “no career in American literature has been as brilliant, varied, controversial, public, productive, lengthy and misunderstood” as Mailer’s.
First, Mailer as the innovator of the participatory journalism of the late 1950s and 1960s, drilling holes through the walls between genres and playing actor and witness at once. The novel was always his master form, Lennon argues, but it was the idea of the novel that let him plunder the others, and his novels themselves sit “in the second row” behind the polemical essay and the nonfiction narrative, biography included. Borrowing Richard Poirier’s line that Mailer was Melville without Moby-Dick, Lennon answers that The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song are his Walden and his Crime and Punishment. Second, Mailer as the leading public intellectual of American letters for thirty years, in more than a hundred periodicals from Partisan Review to Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, on talk shows and campuses, a figure no one since, Christopher Hitchens included, has replaced. Third, Mailer as the chronicler of the half-century, with the Kennedy assassination behind eight books from The Presidential Papers to Oswald’s Tale, and The Time of Our Time set beside Dos Passos’s U.S.A.
Lennon surveyed the career at greater length, decade by decade, in “Mailer by the Decade: An Epistolary Slant” (2008).
Related pages
- 2011-11-10-lennon-why-mailer-matters | J. Michael Lennon | Harry Ransom Center | Mailer by the Decade: An Epistolary Slant | 2011