Mind of an Outlaw

September 2, 2013
The 50 essays collected in this retrospective volume span 64 years and show Mailer (1923–2007) at his brawny, pugnacious, and egotistical best. Although early selections seem dated—among them, “The Homosexual Villain,” his confession of his ignorance of, and hence past uneasiness with, homosexuality—he hits his stride with the 1957 classic “The White Negro,” which equates the mindset of white hipster rebels with the sensibility of American blacks, who have “been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.” Here, Mailer also draws parallels between outlaw minds and criminal psychopaths, a thread that winds through several essays, notably “Until Dead,” prompted by the execution of Gary Gilmore (subject of Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Executioner’s Song), and “Discovering Jack H. Abbott,” which launched his campaign to get convicted murderer Abbott released from prison. Mailer’s many interests led him to topics including his contemporaries’ novels, Marilyn Monroe’s films, black power, and politics. He’s sharpest when writing about himself, as in the title essay, an engrossing account of getting his novel The Deer Park published. Featuring an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, this provocative collection brims with insights and reflections that show why Mailer is regarded as a great literary mind of his generation. Agent: Jeffrey Posternak, Wylie Agency.

October 15, 2013
Further advertisements for himself by the late and increasingly not-so-well-remembered bad boy of postwar American literature. In Advertisements for Myself (1959), with which this collection has some overlap, Mailer famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) wrote, "The only one of my contemporaries who I felt had more talent than myself was James Jones." Even then, he took apart Jones' From Here to Eternity (1951) for its "faults, ignorances, and a smudge of the sentimental," naturally preferring his own novel The Naked and the Dead (1948). As for Jack Kerouac, no go; James Baldwin "is too charming a writer to be major"; and so forth. It has to be remembered, on reading such unguarded statements, that for all Mailer's pugnacious self-regard, he had a point: He was the big dog in the yard, at least for a time, and what he wrote, plenty of people read and pondered and argued about. His 1957 essay "The White Negro," included here, was one such occasion, bringing the word "hipster" to currency but, more seriously, giving voice to the existential angst that characterized the time. Mailer risked ostracism and worse by declaring that the United States was the heavy in the Cold War, and if he could be heavy-handed and lumbering and old-fashioned sounding ("Technological man in his terminal diseases, dying of air he can no longer breathe, of packaged foods he can just about digest, of plastic clothing his skin can hardly bear and of static before which his spirit has near expired"), very few did political outrage better. In fact, as this wide-ranging collection shows, which is political from start to finish, about his only rival in miffed political discourse was Gore Vidal. As good an introduction to Mailer's habits of mind as there's ever been, though there's also room for an anthology blending the greatest hits of his fiction as well as his sharp-edged essays.

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May 15, 2013

Famed for his provocative fiction, Pulitzer Prize winner Mailer was just as adept at the short nonfiction form; in a recent list of ten best essays published since 1950, Mailer's "The White Negro" ranked second after James Baldwin's "Notes on a Native Son." This first posthumous publication offers Mailer's most telling essays on favorite subjects from art to gender to politics, and editor Sipiora has even discovered a previously unpublished piece on Freud.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2013

Writer, controversial cultural icon, and National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Mailer (The Naked and the Dead; Armies of the Night; The Executioner's Song) died in 2007, but his reputation as a giant of American letters survives. These 50 pieces--essays, speeches, screeds, and reviews--edited by Sipiora (English & film studies, Univ. of South Florida) examine artistic freedom ("What I Think of Artistic Freedom"), politics ("Christ, Satan, and the Presidential Candidate," "Clinton and Dole: The War of the Oxymorons"), literature and writing ("The Mind of an Outlaw," "Huckleberry Finn, Alive at 100," "The Hazards and Sources of Writing"), social issues ("Until Dead: Thoughts on Capital Punishment"), and a host of other topics. Organized chronologically from 1942 to 2006, the selections open a window onto the capacious mind and process of one of the most volatile intellects of the 20th century; Mailer was admired and reviled in equal measure. VERDICT Plenty of critics have commented throughout the decades on Mailer's sometimes uneven output, but very few of them ever questioned the passion or power of his prose. Taken individually, these pieces are snapshots of times and places integral to the cultural landscape of America over the last 70 years. Regarded as a whole, they serve as insightful social commentary and justification for continued attention to the writer's work.--Patrick A. Smith, Bainbridge Coll., GA

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.