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“... and their parties. Wilson’s disagreement with Nabokov, Lillian’s fight with Mary, and Norman’s fights with everybody, were the Boy’s Own stories of my youth. I was 29 when my first book was discussed in the New York Review and before I even read the piece I felt victorious, because the issue opened with an essay by Elizabeth Hardwick. The ...”

“... meet. He began his career as a proponent of the non-fiction novel pioneered by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer; his first book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984), was a painstaking re-creation of the life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. He topped that with an account of Fred and Rosemary West’s killing careers, Happy like ...”

“... and seeks to emulate (clear echoes in The Book of Dave of The Drowned World), but rather of Norman Mailer, particularly the vainglorious, dick-swinging Mailer of ‘The White Negro’ (1956): there is the same priapism, the same shameless display, the same gusto and verve, the same excruciating hipsterism, as ...”

“... one knew what happened in the Twenties because no one living today was alive then. And the famous Norman Mailer, who had a hammock suspended under the roof of his New York apartment so that when, as he put it, ‘things got boring,’ the whole family could rush from the gallery on the second floor and jump into it. And finally Ronald Reagan himself, who ...”

“... entertain many literary visitors. A Sunday supper they gave in 1957, for example, was attended by Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter and William Styron.’ The authors call people who want to know this kind of thing ‘literary travellers’ and they plead that such travellers have in the past been handicapped by the lack of a guidebook that covered ...”

“... unintentionally hilarious pages. Throughout, he refers to himself in the third person, rather as Norman Mailer and my small children do; though my kids, of course, do it only when they know they’ve been naughty and wish to neutralise rage with bogus charm. Gay Talese did all this dreary work – nearly a decade of listening to socially disorganised ...”

“... said he hated New York for the greed and envy at Elaine’s, but he talked about Truman Capote and Norman Mailer as he did ten years ago – as rivals and enemies, coming back to them obsessively. Worst of all the New York crowd was Alfred Kazin – ‘Saul Bellow called him the conductor on the gravy train. Wherever they were passing out ...”

“... the urban immigrant outpouring of Augie March) and to Barbary Shore and The Deer Park (the novels Norman Mailer wrote between his initial success with the more conventional war novel The Naked and the Dead and his emergence as a hipster prophet). Like Bellow and Mailer, Matthiessen eventually escaped the GI ...”

“... Like Norman Mailer in America, Kingsley Amis has made a career out of being nasty to women. Even in the days of low consciousness, Lucky Jim had liberals protesting at its treatment of the academic spinster Margaret, a woman whose sole offence was to be physically unattractive to young men. As the woman question has grown more noticeable, Amis’s gallery of male chauvinists has grown too, until in Stanley and the Women he has created a world in which only men appear to communicate with one another, and their favourite topic is their dislike of women ...”

“... Select ... I write best when I weep’), the inimitable Burroughs and the indescribably awful Norman Mailer, who used his evenings in Paris with black jazz players to sketch a model of the New York anti-hero, the Hipster, who was ‘to be considered a white Negro’. Baldwin later wrote (in masterly understatement): ‘I could not, with the best will ...”

“... Society and gets in touch with the gritty realities of life by hanging out with George Plimpton, Norman Mailer and his wife-at-the-time, Jeannie Campbell, daughter of the Duke of Argyll. She has the chance of a new, if not totally different career with the offer of a job on American Vogue, but she never gets round to taking it up. People laugh at her ...”

“... unclear but Berling seems – in a formula which recalls Lawrence Schiller’s involvement with Norman Mailer on The Executioner’s Song – to have been the man with the brass facts, willing to relinquish his load (Katz, typically, prefers the word ‘lode’) to a writer. But the top-billed author expresses a willingness to be blamed for the ...”

“... Ernest Hemingway was the first to weigh in with rubberiness, Mary McCarthy provided apolitical, Norman Mailer came up with porno (natch), Stanley Kauffmann – a novelist as well as a film critic – originated both gabbiness and vomitous, and John Betjeman was the first and, indeed, the only person ever to use the word plung (which the OED defines as ...”

“... five nights a week’ on TV. Their house was the place for parties, where guests included Norman Mailer and Spotted Eagle, a Native American chief who liked ‘radical-chic pussy’. Still, the Sixties didn’t do the Ayer-Wells marriage much good: Dee increasingly saw Freddie as an ‘uptight old fart’ and he thought her ‘a loudmouthed ...”

“... and irrelevant’. Over the years, a lot of these effete and irrelevant artists – John Updike, Norman Mailer, Jonathan Franzen – have launched tirades against him. The most concise comes from John Irving, commenting red-faced and furious on live TV: ‘Wolfe’s problem is, he can’t bleeping write! He’s not a writer! Just crack one of his ...”