Norman Mailer at 100

"Norman Mailer at 100 celebrates the author's centennial in 2023 and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of his bestselling debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, by illustrating how Mailer remains a still provocative presence in American letters. Novelist and Mailer scholar Robert J. Begiebing lays out the extent to which the polymath author's work makes vital contributions to the larger American literary landscape from the debates of the nation's founders, to the traditions of western romanticism, and to the whole juggernaut of twentieth-century modernism. The book presents six critical essays, two creative dialogues featuring Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway, and Begiebing's own interview with Mailer from 1983 on his Brooklyn boyhood, his Harvard years, and the composition of his novel Ancient Evenings. Each piece pairs Mailer with a critical interlocutor whose work offers telling revelations about his ideas and art, among them Hemingway, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, Kate Millett, Joan Didion, and the historian Joseph Ellis. These pairings open up discussions of literature and politics encompassing war novels, Jungian self-analysis, second wave feminism and the women's liberation movement, the fragmentation and roiling revolt of the mid-1960s, the search for self-knowledge and inner truth, and how economic inequity and foreign policy can challenge the fundamentals of American democracy. Norman Mailer at 100 presents a new path into the author's life and work by encouraging a reconsideration of his career from his debut novel to his final books in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, underscoring the potential for finding in his work a new pertinence for the challenges of today"--