Norman Mailer ended his short story-writing career by blowing up the world. “The Last Night: A Story” was published in the December 1963 edition of Esquire and provided an apocalyptic transition between a struggling artist of the 1950s and the more mature and seasoned “author who takes himself seriously.”[1] The Mailer signing off in the pages of Esquire had discovered a new voice in Advertisements for Myself after a difficult decade had him questioning his own competence as a novelist. His second novel Barbary Shore had not been as well received as he would have liked, one critic calling it “evil-smelling” and another “paceless, tasteless, and graceless.”[2] The Deer Park had publishing difficulties, recounted in “Mind of an Outlaw,” until Knopf, after a lengthy consideration, ultimately refused because Blanch Knopf was “almost irrationally terrified” of consequences to the publishing house.[3] Even though these trials had Mailer considering that his breakout novel The Naked and the Dead might have been “an imposture,”[4] Walter Minton of Putnum’s finally took the novel, but only after Mailer’s dark night of the soul forced him to take a long, critical look at himself and to pick up the mantle of the artist/rebel to transform himself and his work for a new decade.
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Citations
- ↑ Lennon 2013, p. 333.
- ↑ Rollyson 1991, p. 71.
- ↑ Lennon 2013, pp. 179–180.
- ↑ Mailer 2020, #159.
Works Cited
- Lennon, J. Michael (2013). Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- Mailer, Norman (2020). Lennon, J. Michael; Lucas, Gerald R.; Mailer, Susan, eds. "Lipton's Journal". Project Mailer. The Norman Mailer Society. Retrieved 2021-09-13.
- Rollyson, Carl (1991). The Lives of Norman Mailer. New York: Paragon House.