Interests
Advertisements for Myself
Norman Mailer
Year read: approximately 1961, my age, approximately 20
I read this during the summer after my freshman or sophomore year of college, I do not remember which. I had for a while suspected I wanted to be a writer, and this book seemed to me to be what writing was about: the author engaging the ideas and personalities of his time. Mailer was so into this issue of engagement that he used the metaphor of going into the boxing ring with Hemingway. I was particularly struck by the White Negro essays which suggested that 50s society had taken the life blood out of the individual, and that a combination of the Negro and the sociopath represented a personality type that might reassert itself. I see much of what happened in 60s culture (political protest, radical forms of psychology, the drug culture, and the literary traditions of Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcus, and Paul Goodman) as relating to, being predicted by, or growing out of this book. I was also struck by the sexual combat Mailer described in The Time of Her Time, indicating to me that the tension between the sexes could be expressed in sexual encounter.
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