From Egypt to Langley: Ancient Evenings, Tough Guys Don’t Dance and Harlot’s Ghost

Abstract

It would be a further fifteen years before Mailer would publish his next novel, Ancient Evenings (1983). During the 1970s he consolidated his reputation both as a creative journalist and as a biographer of exceptional achievement in such works as Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) and The Executioner’s Song (1979), with the latter winning Mailer’s second Pulitzer Prize. He remained one of the most energetic contributors to the accelerating revision of American values, most famously perhaps in his response to Kate Millett’s feminist attack upon him in her book Sexual Politics (1970). His published reply, The Prisoner of Sex (1971), was yet another extension of his literary range, being part polemic, part self-study, part literary criticism. Throughout these prolific years Mailer certainly justified Robert Lowell’s description of him as ‘the best journalist in America’¹ while at the same time raising doubts about his exhaustion as a writer of fiction. Yet as far back as 1964 he had begun to promise delivery of a novel of the highest quality, one that would establish him without question as a literary artist of the first rank.