Late Mailer: His Writing and Reputation since Ancient Evenings

Abstract

Norman Mailer died on 10 November 2007, and within a week hundreds of obituaries had been disseminated through the blogosphere. Just as Mailer set his personal vision against a representative official story at the beginning of his most influential work Armies of the Night (1968), it will be useful to begin with two remembrances. The first is from The Independent, and it is representative of many obituaries, though there were many that did not begin in the same backhanded way:

Norman Mailer wanted to be the Hemingway of his generation, but it is not as a novelist that he will be remembered—even The Naked and the Dead, the Second World War story which made him famous at the age of 25, is rarely read today. Too often in the course of Mailer’s career, celebrity triumphed over undeniable talent. (Rosenheim)

He had in fact learned to live in the sarcophagus of his image—at night, in his sleep, he might dart out, and paint improvements on the sarcophagus. During the day, while he was helpless, newspapermen and other assorted bravos of the media and the literary world would carve ugly pictures on the tomb of his legend.

Armies of the Night 5