Conclusion

Abstract

Mailer has taken an increasingly active role with regard to his own work, not merely in becoming the ‘hero’ of his later books, but as a critic and commentator on his own literary career. In the late forties and early fifties, he produced several articles for the magazine Dissent and his first three novels, but remained for the most part silent about the process of their production, about his problems, self-assessment and general views on literature. His view of literary work as a vocation changed, as I have suggested in the third part of this study, as the result of his experience of writing and publishing The Deer Park, and this change was fully documented in Advertisements for Myself. His conception of himself as a ‘psychic outlaw’¹ and of life as a battle whose characteristic attitude was hostility, began with this crucial personal and literary experience:

And so as the language of sentiment would have it, something broke in me, but I do not know if it was so much a loving heart, as a cyst on the weak, the unreal, and the needy, and I was finally open to my anger. I turned within my psyche I can almost believe, for I felt something shift to murder in me. I finally had the simple sense to understand that if I wanted my work to travel further than others, the life of my talent depended on fighting a little more …²