Summary
Not just the writer-others are better equipped for that job-but the feisty, irascible New Yorker who tried to carry a generation on his shoulders: the son of Crown Heights, the Boys High grad who made it to Harvard, the jug-eared young man who went to war, the imaginer of alternative newspapers, the brief inmate of Bellevue's psych ward, the passionate, kamikaze mayoral candidate, the head-butting, put-your-dukes-up saloon intellectual, the perpetual celebrator ofhimself. A blowup of the cover has long hung in the Voice's lobby, and since the single slow elevator gives us so much time there to ponder, I've looked at it often and wondered what prompted that particular blast Last week, I finally pulled one of the old green bound volumes off the library shelves to find out As it happens, the hoped-for screed was only a small boxed correction.
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Extract
Why Mailer Matters
Norman Kingsley Mailer may have been his own biggest fan and, without doubt, he was his own worst enemy.
By his own invitation, most of his postmortems focused on his literary ranking, or lack of one. It was a comparison Mailer steadily encouraged over the years as he fretted over his status like some agingminor-leagueballplayer.Likewise, you couldn't write his obituary without telling aboutthe near-fatal wife-stabbing, the ear-rippingwrestlingmatch, or the too-trusting mentor who helped win the release of a talented but murderous convict who promptly killed again.In life, he so pissed people off that even Budd Schulberg, the gentle nonagenarian who shared h...See the full content of this document
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