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Although Norman Mailer consistently refers to himself as a novelist, he has written more nonfiction narratives than novels, and the former have received more favorable reviews. A survey of the reviews of his key works from 1948-1998 (including nine novels) in national publications shows that his creative nonfiction, reportage and biographies have generally received greater favorable comment than his fiction (excepting The Naked and the Dead). A careful analysis of Mailer's utterances on the novel, journalism and history as competing, overlapping "modes of perception" demonstrates his conviction that the historical novel is the form best able to deliver social and cultural history in our time. He offers Dos Passos' U.S.A. as the form's finest exemplar, one which engulfs and ingests competing forms, and hints that his own mammoth anthology, The Time of Our Time, be seen as its successor.
Keywords: novel / creative nonfiction / history / narrative / journalism
In Advertisements for Myself (1959), Norman Mailer said, "I feel that the final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate the moral consciousness of people. In particular, I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because it's the most immediate, the most overbearing, if you will. It is the most inescapable" (384). Twenty years later, when Milton Bragg asked why he thought fiction was so important, Mailer said, "Oh, because I think it's the place where art and philosophy and adventure finally come together. For me there's nothing more beautiful than a marvelous novel. I love the idea of a novel; to me a novel is better than a reality" (Bragg 260-61). In a 1981 interview with Paul Attanasio, later collected in Pieces and Pontifications (1982), Mailer hit the same note: "My idea finally is that fiction is a noble pursuit, that ideally it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their experience. You know, one Tolstoy, in my mind, is worth maybe 10,000 very good writers" (Attanasio, Pieces and Pontifications 133).
Perhaps the most pointed of Mailer's generic comments comes in the preface to his 1976 collection, Some Honorable Men: Political Conventions, 1960-72. "Ever since Tom Wolfe began to write those self-serving encomiums to the New Journalism it has been a...