It's not long after until he skirts the protocol of the entire criminal justice system, is free on the streets, and "falls in love" with a lounge singer who he met just moments after staging his wife's death. He becomes obsessed with Cherry, and Cherry, like Ruta, the maid who Stephen nails just after murdering his wife, and Deborah, has a long history of sleeping with dangerous men who think very little of her for the sake of social status. Mailer grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Harvard University in 1943 with a degree in aeronautical engineering. Drafted into the army in 1944, he served in the Pacific until 1946. While he was enrolled at the Sorbonne, in Paris, he wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948), hailed immediately as one of the finest American novels to come out of World War II. The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.” — Chicago Tribune

However, I find in Diana Trilling’s assessment of his response something that helps me to define my lingering ambivalence about the social ideas embodied in Mailer’s novel (even if I still rate it as exceptional writing): Quase inteiramente escrito na primeira pessoa, em que o narrador é, também, o fulcro de todo o livro, este é mais um magnífico livro que pertence ao legado negro dos anos 60 do século passado,nos EUA.

Kaufmann, Donald (2007). " An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare". The Mailer Review. 1 (1): 194–205. ISSN 1936-4679. Tanner, Tony (1971). "On the Parapet". City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970. New York: Harper & Row. pp.344–371. Mas Mailer é infinitamente mais contundente, agressivo e incisivo. Mas também mais íntimo, complexo e dubitativo. Up to the Nostrils in Anguish': Mailer and Bellow on Masculine Anxiety and Violent Catharsis". The Mailer Review. 9 (1): 99–117. ISSN 1936-4679.

Millett criticizes Mailer for being almost wholly unique among prominent authors in championing a character who is a murderer, while allowing the offender to escape any accountability for his crimes: Production [ edit ] Publicity still from the set of An American Dream: Eleanor Parker and Stuart Whitman (actors), Robert Gist (director, behind them) and Sam Leavitt (cinematographer, in white hat) It’s this approach that, for better or worse, differentiates the novel from those of Chandler and Cain. It also, arguably, adopts a similar approach to Camus’ “The Stranger”. Norman Mailer, (born January 31, 1923, Long Branch, New Jersey, U.S.—died November 10, 2007, New York, New York), American novelist and journalist best known for using a form of journalism—called New Journalism—that combines the imaginative subjectivity of literature with the more objective qualities of journalism. Both Mailer’s fiction and his nonfiction made a radical critique of the totalitarianism he believed inherent in the centralized power structure of 20th- and 21st-century America.

Sign-in to your account

Still, he sees his love of Cherry as “deranged and doomed”. He craves the ability to “love her and be sensible as well”. But the moonlit voice in his head warns, “The sensible are never free.” LeVar Burton - Growing Up Reading & His Dreams of Hosting "Jeopardy!" | The Daily Show , retrieved 2021-09-18 Macdonald, Dwight (1974). " Armies of the Night, or Bad Man Makes Good". Discriminations: Essays and Afterthoughts. New York: Grossman. pp.210–216. ISBN 9780670274376. OCLC 72900083.