Norman Mailer is the kind of writer people now tend to look at and appraise by saying, “He could never get away with that today.” And maybe that’s true. In Mailer’s case, however, the that they’re referring to could be any of the following things: his confrontational public statements; his misbehavior on talk shows; his ardent bad-boy meditations on subjects like sexuality and violence; his propensity to drink and drug and fight (he liked to literally butt heads with people at parties); and great lyrical swaths of his writing.
Forget what Mailer could or could not get away with today. He was feeding the fire of controversy and provocation
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