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Writer Experiences

Introduction

In re-reading Norman Mailer's works of the fifties, I have discovered that his major works of this period -Barbary Shore (1951), Deer Park (1955), and Advertisements for Myself (1959) are much more ideologically complicated than those works either before the decade or after it.' In the major works of the fifties, Mailer has tried, as we read them in a new perspective, uncompromisingly to subvert the dominant ideologies of the period, such as “New Conservatism, McCarthyism, and other social conformist ideologies (Breslow, 5-105).

His works and life

Son of Isaac Barnett, a Jewish accountant originally from South Africa, and Fanny Schneider, manager of an agency for maids, Mailer was raised in Brooklyn. He joined the Harvard University in 1939 where he studied ' Engineering Aeronautics. There he developed an interest for writing and published his first story at the age of eighteen.

He got enlisted in the U.S. Army, and he participated in the Second World War in the South Pacific . In 1948 , just before entering the Sorbonne in Paris , he wrote The Naked and the Dead based on his experience of war in the Pacific, which made ??him famous.

In subsequent years, Norman Mailer wrote scripts for Hollywood, which were mostly rejected. In the mid 1950's, tempted by Marxism and atheism, he became a famous writer promoting anti-establishment and libertarian views. In The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (1956), and Advertisements for Myself ( 1959 ), he deals with violence, the hysteria , crime and confusion in American society. His works are splited between a realism inherited from John Dos Passos and journalistic writing close to Ernest Hemingway and is meant to awaken the consciousness of the injustices of the time. He also tries to study the neuroses and pathologies of Western society in constant crisis of values in a provocative manner. He was a symbol of opposition to the Vietnam War in 1960 and 1970 (Dienstirey, 112-134).

Norman Mailer is also known as a biographer, he wrote biographies about Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso and Lee Harvey Oswald .

He was married six times and had nine children (one adopted). In 1960 , he assaulted his wife with a penknife at a party. A formal complaint of domestic violence was not registered against Mailer but he spent three weeks in a psychiatric hospital.

Mailer won many veteran journalist awards. He won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for The Armies of the Night in 1969 , and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980 for The Executioner's Song. In 1980 he received the insignia of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by government of France and in March 2006 he received, the Legion of Honour from the hands of the ambassador of France to the United States (Fhrlich, 43-120).

Under President George W. Bush , he emerged as an opponent of his policies. "The worst president I have ever seen," he proclaimed, and he published a book with the youngest of his nine children, The ...