Advertisements for Myself - Hardcover

Mailer, Norman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 058602381X ISBN 13: 9780586023815

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 1985

Synopsis

Originally published in 1959, Advertisements for Myself is an inventive collection of stories, essays, polemic, meditations, and interviews. It is Mailer at his brilliant, provocative, outrageous best. Emerging at the height of "hip," Advertisements is at once a chronicle of a crucial era in the formation of modern American culture and an important contribution to the great autobiographical tradition in American letters.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Long Branch, NJ, in 1923, and raised in Brooklyn, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the 20th century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.

Review

Anyone with a serious interest in American and in twentieth-century literature will applaud the reprinting of Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself. No single work of his, before or since, is as important to an understanding of his literary career or of his emergence as an authentic public personality, and none is as fully representative of the range and variety of his concerns. (Richard Poirier Rutgers University)

This is a wonderful exercise in American autobiography, and in that self-mocking, self-glorifying, cynical, naive, outrageous, intelligent, uniquely his own and uniquely American autobiographical voice of which Mailer is the modern master. (Wendy Lesser Threepenny Review)

Combining fictional fragments, autobiography, journalism, polemic...with a running commentary tracing the ups and downs of a novel-in-progress (Dos Passos for our times?) and asserting the author's place in the batting order of GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS, the book contains some of the best stuff Mailer ever produced. (Karal Ann Marling, University of Minnesota)

At the very time that he is perhaps too insistently trying to recall the audience and himself to the importance of the task of the novelist, he is creating another public persona, part clown, part vulgarian, fool and genius, whose arena is not the imagined story, but the imagined life, led first in the pages of newspapers or on television screens, and then (giving us the story behind the spectacle) turned into essays (or are they stories?) whose main character is this endlessly revised 'Norman Mailer'--a kind of expository confessional poetry. (Jay Cantor, author of Krazy Kat)

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 058602381X
• ISBN 13: 9780586023815
• Binding: Hardcover