October 15, 2021

“It Might Not Be Unpleasant to Live”:
The Transitional Short Fiction of Norman Mailer

“ D.J. is like Mailer's other narrators who have identity problems, doubt their maleness, fear the feminine in themselves, and try to strike out on their own. Mailer's narrators, when they succeed, do so by finding an identity in the roles they play. ” — Carl Rollyson, The Lives of Norman Mailer

The mid-1950s were a difficult time for Norman Mailer. 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.” 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. Even though these trials had Mailer considering that his breakout novel The Naked and the Dead might have been “an imposture,” Walter Minton of Putnum’s finally agreed to publish The Deer Park in 1955, 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.

Mailer’s views at the time were expansive. He longed to be something great, and he knew he had the capacity and desire to prove himself a “major writer,” though he was tired of playing “the comic figure” running “the circuit from Rinehart to Putnamn.” Even before Minton accepted The Deer Park, Mailer had been ready to self-publish the novel “to make a kind of publishing history” and as an act of defiance against the “gentlemen” of the publishing industry that had become too conservative and spineless. He writes: “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, and looking for help a little less.” Mailer’s conviction to become a “psychic outlaw” has its genesis in his negative experience in publishing The Deer Park, but his thoughts were leaning in this direction even before: specifically in his transitional short fiction that acts as a proving ground for ideas he workshopped in Lipton’s Journal and published in Advertisements for Myself—specifically in “The White Negro.” The group of short stories dating from the winter of 1951–52 allowed Mailer a space to explore the dissident and subversive ideas that would characterize his work after Advertisements for Myself.

Mailer saw many social forces as strong and oppressive toward the individual, attempting to shape them in its image, and enslaving in a stagnant and ultimately lifeless existence. The struggle is the only constant for Mailer, and this idea was reflected in his fiction and the conflicts of his protagonists to assert their individualism in the face of great opposition. Mailer saw himself as a “peronality-in-progress” which found its way into his work during this time in the form of the ubiquitous forces of conformity that attempt to “bury the primitive” and to shape the individual into socially acceptable forms—generic, castrated, benign, and out of touch with something essential. Later in The Presidential Papers, Mailer writes: “What is at stake in the twentieth century is . . . the peril that they will extinguish the animal in us.” In an attempt to resist these forces, Mailer turned to self-analysis during the winter of 1954–55 in what he called Lipton’s Journal.

In Lipton’s, Mailer posits a dichotomy of opposition between external regulating forces—which he calls “sociostatis”—and the essence of the individual, which he calls “homeostasis,” then “homeodynamism.” The former he likens to the forces that regulate social order while the latter he sees as an individual’s energy, movement, and creativity in resisting those forces that would homogenize and oppress him—a conscious movement that Mailer claims is “the most healthy act possible at any moment for the soul.” In biology, homeostasis is the body’s internal balance of physical and chemical conditions that help protect against external influences, yet in Mailer’s evolving thought, he replaces “stasis” with “dynamism” suggesting that constant movement resists the imposed stasis of society and is a necessary action for realizing the individual. This dualism comes to represent a major disconnect in the contemporary world and a key struggle for Mailer and his protagonists. In other words, his work in Lipton’s propels him to write: “I must trust what my instincts tell me is good rather than what the world says is good.” Perhaps most germane for Mailer, he opines that “sociostatic repression always allows the writer the least dangerous (to society) expression of his vision” and that the “homeodynamic demands the most.”

Cannabis, the “tea” from which Lipton’s gets its name, might have been an essential catalyst in uncovering this primal revelation for Mailer, for “Lipton’s . . . destroys the sense of society and opens the soul.” Smoking tea may have been the integral taboo action that facilitated the transition from his earlier work to his more mature style beginning with “The White Negro” and Advertisements for Myself. It certainly allowed him to conclude that the post-Enlightenment state of society, that associated with reason and rationalization, is antithetical to the health and well-being of individuals when reason can weaponized by the state. In turn, “life fights back by having people become monsters and mystics” and embrace the irrational and the violent, for “it is possible that at this moment in history the irrational expressions of man are more healthy than the rational.” Mailer’s hipster figuration and his writer-in-opposition persona which would appear later in “The White Negro” and Advertisements for Myself are engendered in Lipton’s, but they really begin in his short fiction from the winter of 1951–52.

For Mailer, short fiction was not to be taken as seriously as novels—or as a shameful pastime between novels, as he complains in a letter to Mickey Knox: “I’ve given up temporarily trying to write my damn novel, and have started doing short stories. (Don’t spread this around.)” In the “deadest winter of the dead years 1951–52,” Mailer would write a handful of short stories as antidote to his troubles in writing The Deer Park, but these stories were written quickly and, he comments, were characterized by “sadness in the prose” that suggested to him that “I had nothing important left to write about, that maybe I was not really a writer—I thought often of becoming a psychoanalyst.” Indeed, the short stories coming out of this time were all characterized by beaten protagonists and provide a transition from Mailer’s early work to his new voice exemplified by Advertisements for Myself. This group of five stories Mailer collects in Advertisements under part two: “Middles.” It includes three stories about World War II written by the author of The Naked and the Dead—“The Paper House,” “The Language of Men,” and “The Dead Gook” (all written by the end of 1951)—and two in the city: “The Notebook” (also at the end of 1951) a scene inspired by an argument with his wife Adele, and “The Man Who Studied Yoga” (April 1952). In addition to similar protagonists, these stories are also interested in the psychology of the individual, the external forces that influence one’s psyche, and the correct actions a man must take in relation to his environment.

This group of five stories concern a central figure and his struggles with his identity vis-à-vis external forces, usually feminine or feminized that acts as the major antagonistic force against the growth of the protagonist’s identity. “The Man Who Studies Yoga” stands apart in several ways and acts as a transitional story, both narratively and stylistically to his later short fiction. By living dangerously and confronting existential situations, Mailer’s protagonists attempt to define their identities. In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer writes: “Masculinity is not something given to you, something you’re born with, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honour.” These small battles are the crucial moments in life that define the experience of Mailer’s characters and could be likened to the protagonists’ struggles to transcend their oppression. They are risky and dangerous, push beyond safe boundaries often through sexual and/or violent encounters, and are necessary for continued growth.

In Norman Mailer: A Double Life, J. Michael Lennon cites Nietzsche’s work as an influence on Mailer’s ideas, particularly a section called “Live Dangerously” in Walter Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre: “For, believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge!” So, Mailer’s “honor,” here, could be read as a courage to accept the challenge, to look danger in the face, and try to be ready for whatever comes next. It’s a part of Mailer’s concept of American existentialism where the outcome is both serious and uncertain that his later Hipster lives by in his “uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.” In his essay “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer writes “you are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place, and you do not know how it is going to turn out.” Living dangerously, then, defines the protagonist on his own terms—not as other external, sociostatic forces might compel him too be. The existential situation pits the protagonist against external forces, and the outcome of these small battles shapes the protagonist’s identity in subtle and profound ways.

While Mailer theorizes the liberating power of living dangerously, the protagonists in these transitional stories are all overwhelmed by their situations and ultimately fail in finding their individual identities that would be appropriate and healthy for embracing life. In other words, these protagonists might catch a glimpse of how to act in a genuine, life-affirming way, but are never able to quite understand it or act upon it. These protagonists are all frustrated, beaten, and impotent in confronting the overwhelming forces they are up against: they each have the insight to know there is more to life than what they do, as Brody in “The Dead Gook” muses that “it might not be unpleasant to live,” but they lack the courage or fortitude to “live dangerously” and embrace that genuine life. Yet, the therapeutic quality of these stories seems cathartic for Mailer himself: he seems to rid his own psyche of its reluctance to stand defiant and oppose the totalizing forces of sociostatis that can lead toward homeodynamic expressions.

“The Paper House”

Taken from an anecdote told to him by Vance Bourjaily, “The Paper House” seems to be an updated and more mature version of “Love Buds,” an earlier short story Mailer wrote during his senior year at Harvard in 1942–43. Both stories concern two friends visiting a whorehouse, but while the love buds are young and unable to go though see it through, the two soldiers of the later story are regular patrons of the geishas. While the early story’s title emphasizes the two boys who are not yet able to relinquish their boyhood, “The Paper House” shifts the emphasis to the literal whorehouse which figuratively stands for the delicate worldview of the protagonist.

“The Paper House” is a battle of the sexes, an appropriate narrative for Mailer’s transitional short fiction that will also be echoed in his later story The Time of Her Time.”

. . .

“The Language of Men”

In “The Language of Men,” Mailer’s protagonist Sanford Carter longs to connect with his fellow soldiers, but can’t seem to be break out of the roles that have been imposed upon him by others. One of Mailer’s army stories, “The Language of Men” centers around Sanford and his assignment as an army cook after the war. From the outset, he has an aversion to this job without quite knowing why. Similarly, Sanford feels that his service has not been successful, and he needed to do something “to prove to himself that he was not completely worthless” to the “huge army which had proved to him that he was good at no work, and incapable of succeeding at anything.” His insecurities bubble to the surface throughout the story, leaving Sanford in fits of rage, “close to violent attacks of anger,” and near to tears.

While Sanford seems incapable of decoding his troubles, Mailer provides clues that suggest Sanford’s identity has been determined by his community and the need for security and acceptance, perhaps centering around the fact that he “was accustomed to the attention and the protection of women. He would have thrown away all he possessed — the love of his wife, the love of his mother, the benefits of his education, the assured financial security of entering his father's business—if he had been able just once to dig a ditch as well as the most ignorant farmer.”

Sanford’s life has been cloistered from the necessary experiences that would help him build his own identity. Even the army added to his impotence by making him a cook. This fact, coupled with Sanford’s admission that he “was accustomed to the attention and the protection of women” suggests further that he has been feminized by his experiences and shaped into something other than a man that would be successful in the army and accepted by the other soldiers. At first, when assigned to be a cook, Sanford acts with revulsion, as

cooks existed for him as a symbol of all that was corrupt, overbearing, stupid, and privileged in army life. The image which came to mind was a fat cook with an enormous sandwich in one hand, and a bottle of beer in the other, sweat pouring down a porcine face, foot on a flour barrel, shouting at the K.P.s, “Hurry up, you men, I ain't got all day.” More than once in those two and a half years, driven to exasperation, Carter had been on the verge of throwing his food into a cook’s face as he passed on the serving line. His anger often derived from nothing . . . Since life in the army was in most aspects a marriage, this rage over apparently harmless details was not a sign of unbalance. Every soldier found some particular habit of the army spouse impossible to support.

From the outset, Sanford equates the cook with a overbearing and castrating figure that exerts a wife-like power over him, driving him into a “rage over apparently harmless details.” Coupled with his insecurities of being a failure as a soldier and the fact that he comes from a secure and successful background, he attempts to redirect that aggression into his new role as a cook to win the respect of the men. He became comfortable in the kitchen, tried to make the extra effort to improve the food to each soldier’s individual taste, and “he baked like a housewife satisfying her young husband.” Yet, even though he tried to do his best as a cook, he notices the men start to look at him the way he viewed the cook. Finally, he catches wind of the men’s intention to take some oil from the kitchen for a fish fry — not only is this against the rules, but Sanford finds out that the men had no intention of inviting him — that he was considered “one of the . . . undesirables.” He attempts to show his authority by denying them the oil, and when he is confronted, becomes flustered, falling into the role of the unappreciated housewife, even catching himself as he was about to use utter a cliche:

“I'm sick of trying to please you. You think I have to work”—he was about to say, my fingers to the bone—“well, I don't. From now on, you'll see what chow in the army is supposed to be like.” He was almost hysterical.

Sanford wins this contest by becoming that which he hates. In a moment of frustration, Sanford becomes aggressive and tries to fight Hobbs, a man he knows he could not best. This aggression allows Carter to come out on top, momentarily gaining the men’s respect, especially Hobbs. While there’s a moment of reconciliation at the end of the story, it is short-lived. Sanford again alienates Hobbs by attempting to assert his moral superiority in a passive-aggressive way. Sanford laments at the story’s end that “he would never learn the language of men.” His realization is one of failure. While his aggression with Hobbs seemed to be an existential situation that Sanford could learn from, he falls back into his comfortable, feminized role.

. . .

“The Dead Gook”

The setting of “The Dead Gook” is an island in the Philippines occupied by Japanese and American forces near the end of World War II who are in a kind of stalemate. Both sides are waiting for the war to be “determined elsewhere” and “They were satisfied to let events pass in the most quiet manner possible.” The story concerns an American military patrol led by a group of Filipinos sent on a vague mission. It turns out, the mission is to find out what happened to a missing Filipino guerrilla. It becomes much more than routine for soldier.

The protagonist of “The Dead Gook” is Private Brody—a man oppressed by the reality of the war, but more so by a Dear-John letter he received from his fiancée and what he sees as a pointless patrol that the “buck sergeant” Lucas agreed to undertake at the request of island’s native Filipinos. The soldiers on this island are in a sort of limbo, oppressed by the war, the interminable patrols that “went nowhere,” tropical diseases, and heavy equipment: “It was dreary. There was danger, but it was remote; there was diversion, but it was rare. . . . There were better things to do, but there were certainly worse.” While interminable, there was a quotidian regularity to their shared situation that seemed to give them a certain numbness that’s necessary to survive the situation while life was put on hold. In other words, the soldiers were seasoned and therefore numb to the fact that the war would likely kill them. This survival technique allows the soldiers to function, but it diminished their thoughts and senses making life “mild and colorless.”

However, an encounter with a dead Filipino soon disrupts this “quiet manner” for Private Brody and precipitates his existential crisis. “The Dead Gook” distinguishes between the everyday reality of death that a soldier encounters in war and that of an existential awareness of death that Brody has in the story. Brody’s crisis comes to a head when he encounters Luiz, the dead Filipino, “who was the first dead man who was completely dead to Brody, and it filled him with fright.” 

Mailer suggests that in this sense Brody is a sort of everyman—that this rage sooner or later affects “each of them at different times” when “everything he did expressed a generalized hatred toward the most astonishing people and objects.” Today’s bad day belongs to Brody, but Mailer might be suggesting that these crises are not just individual moments of rage, but are shared by all soldiers—perhaps all people—sooner or later. Poignantly, then, Brody’s imminent existential crisis precipitated by his encounter with the “completely dead” guerrilla suggests that this sort of feeling, like death, will ultimately affect us all. Maybe, Mailer seems to posit, we can learn something about how to react to our individual crises by seeing how Brody reacts to his.

Circumstances align just right in “The Dead Gook” to give Brody a bad day. His somewhat lax sergeant Lucas, “a big relaxed man who spoke slowly and thought slowly” agrees to accompany a group of Filipinos for some unknown purpose, unnecessarily risking the entire squad, thinks Brody, for the undeserving “Gooks.” Brody’s initial dis-ease begins when the letter breaks the “quiet manner” of the war and reminds “him of how he lived, and that was unbearable”; it “destroyed his armor” and “made Brody wonder who he was, and what it would mean if he would die.” Notably, the letter itself is like an invading army from abroad, it shatters Brody’s malaise that allows him to cope as a soldier at war, and it triggers something in him, making him feel that “it might not be unpleasant to live”—initiating his existential crisis. It’s as if the mere suggestion of a woman and a domestic life that continued without him outside the daily realities of the war that breaks the necessary “mild and colorless depression,” and Brody reacts with rage based on his inability to do anything about his current reality. Suddenly, Brody is confronted with the meaningless of his life and identity in the face of a likely death, and he directs his rage the Filipinos: “I hate the Gooks.” What makes it worse is that Brody sees Lucas’ willingness to help the Filipinos as an unnecessary risk to him and the squad for what Brody sees as something trivial.

At one point during their patrol, the squad stops to take a break from front he oppressive heat and humidity of the jungle that inhibits their quick progress. Their nerves are already one edged as they approach the part of the jungle known to be occupied by the Japanese. As the men catch their breath, the Filipinos pass back chunks of pineapple. The pineapple, a symbol of wealth and hospitality in the American south, breaks the monotony, causing “blissful satisfaction,” but increasing their anxiety on the patrol. Their “stomachs accepted the food with lust,” but the relief it offers is temporary, highlighting instead their fatigue and the ominous jungle. The symbolic importance of the pineapple can be likened to the letter: it seems to be an external elements that is able to break through the habits and familiarity of the everyday, causing the soldiers to see the world in a new way. Perhaps the fruit can be linked to Brody’s letter in a way, though less severe. A symbol of hospitality on the southern United States, the pineapple breaks the men out of the oppression of their immediate surroundings. While the unexpected and sweet pineapple offers a treat to the ailing soldiers, it also provides a contrast to their current situation: “the deliciousness of the feast was increased by the situation.” Their break is short-lived, but Mailer seems to use the exotic pineapple to represent the possibility of awakening something that sleeps inside the soldiers with new stimuli.

Just after the effects of the pineapple have worn off, the squad encounters the goal of their mission: the recovery of Luiz, a missing Filipino man. They find him dead behind a Japanese machine gun, and Miguel, the Filipino leader, remarks “he brave mahn. He kill three Japanese last month. He come here every night.” The Japanese machine gun seems to have been won by Luiz, and it becomes a phallic symbol of his heroic mettle. Lucas becomes fascinated by the “funny old gun,” and the sergeant’s calm attitude infuriates Brody all the more: “Brody was angrier than ever. Everything Lucas did seemed outrageous. Like a man who wishes to strike a woman and frustrates the impulse, Brody now effectively begged the woman to strike him.” The “strike” becomes Brody’s volunteering to carry the heavy gun back to camp. While Luiz earned the machine gun by taking it from the Japanese, it becomes a heavy burden for Brody and a symbol of his powerlessness. Brody is uncomfortable with the weight of the gun and struggles to find a way to carry it; it had a “detestable odor” that seems to smell like everything oppressing Brody: the Japanese, the dead Filipino, has own body, and the dank jungle. Brody begins to associate the foul odor with Luiz, the miserable march, and his own current crisis. Poking him in the ribs as he walks, the machine gun becomes a constant reminder to Brody of his current situation and his utter incapacity to do anything about it. As he struggles with the machine gun, he begins to think of the gun as the dead man—the first man that Brody has encountered “who was completely dead.” While Brody had seen much death, it had always lacked significance, but now it “filled his pores” and threatened to overwhelm him to the point of crying or screaming. As he walks, he rages silently and nurses a hatred for the Filipinos in general, but begins to feel as if he is the dead man who is carried by Luiz. Like an animal Brody snarls at guards who are curious about the machine gun, but then surrenders the “prize” to Lucas when the sergeant claims it, an action significant and obvious in its symbolism.

Brody’s impotent rage comes to head when the squad delivers the Filipino crew and the body of Luiz back to their village Panazagay. While the soldiers collapse from fatigue, the women and children react to Luiz’ body with tears and screams. Miguel explains that Luiz’ son was linked by the Japanese and that Luiz went out every night for a month seemingly for vengeance. This fact prompts Lucas to acknowledge the dead man’s bravery: “Well, I guess he was all right.” Later, Brody begins to obsess further about Luiz. He recalls the lamentations of Luiz’ family and villagers when the body was returned, and he begins to admire the dead Filipino’s courage and heroic capacity in attacking the Japanese alone at night: “It seemed impossible; it seemed . . . enormous.” Alone that night in the machine gun emplacement, Brody begins to feel uneasy as he considers his life in relation to Luiz’, and he realizes that no one would weep for him if he were to suddenly be killed because “He had never done a thing in his life which he could consider the least bit exceptional, he could not think of anything to do. He only felt that somehow before he died he must do something. He must be remembered.” Yet, by the next morning, Brody’s crisis had passed. Even though the immediacy of the patrol is mitigated by time and distance, the echoes of the experience continue to haunt Brody through the rest of the war. After the war ends, Brody and Lucas get drunk together—an unlikely pair that the war has thrown together, perhaps like Hayes and Nicholson from “The Paper House”—and the former finds himself at the close of the story “weeping for Luiz, weeping as hard as the old women in the bamboo house” did for him, as the crisis has now passed for Brody and along with it the necessity of his own heroism.

Perhaps Brody has accepted his place in life now that the immediacy of death is no longer imminent since the long, dark night of the war has come to an end. Or, maybe this experience might have been a crucial moment that Brody could have used to change the direction of his life, but, like the pineapple, it was a passing moment of potential quickly covered over by a more comfortable existence. The moment passes for Brody with the war, and though “it might not be unpleasant to life,” it seems that Brody ultimately chooses something less because life would be too terrible. Mailer’s litotes, a trope from the Greek litós, meaning plain, simple, or meagre, is an apt figure of speech for Brody: rather than a positive assertion that “life would be pleasant,” this anti-hyperbole poignantly assesses the man’s weak and beaten personality, something he is never quite able to overcome.

“The Notebook”

In “The Notebook,” Mailer seems to be drawing his material from personal experience—in this case a quarrel with his second wife Adele, a battle-of-the-sexes story. “The Notebook” is a departure from the first three transitional stories, as it does not concern the war and takes place in the city. The style, too, has evolved, as Mailer experiments with narratorial voice: it’s told in a limited omniscient, third-person point-of-view, but implies the narrator is actually the protagonist who has later written a vignette based on an entry in his notebook—the very one that likely ends his relationship with the young lady.

The characters are not named except for “the young lady” and “the writer,” suggesting a parable or allegory—maybe something that could have a lesson or moral upon conclusion. “The writer” becomes an identity that the male protagonist plays, contrasted with “the young lady,” a socially constructed and less well defined role assumed by the antagonist. Here, the writer is a deliberate role the protagonist attempts to define, but it seems too narrow and disconnected for the young lady.

If the lady is young, it’s a safe bet the aspiring writer is too. The implication is that he wants to be a writer and has adopted the mannerisms and behaviors that he thinks a “writer” should practice. His attempt to play a writer in daily life frustrates his girlfriend’s desire to simply live. The narrator states that “The writer was suffering with some dignity,” an unusual sentence that implies his assumed “dignity” is causing his current discomfort. His persona has made the writer an observer of life, rather than one who directly lives it. The young lady complains: “I’m sick and tired of you being so superior. . . . You’re the coldest man I’ve ever known.”

Perhaps this is Mailer’s purging of a fake writer’s persona—using a short story to expurgate “the writer” who might have been beholden to the publishing industry that has given so much recent anxiety around the publication of The Deer Park.

. . .

“The Man Who Studied Yoga”

Notes

Citations

Works Cited

• Dienstrefy, Harris (1964). "The Fiction of Norman Mailer". In Kostelantz, Richard. On Contemporary Literature. New York: Avon. pp. 422–436.
• Gordon, Andrew (1980). An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer. London: Fairleigh Dickinson UP.
• Lennon, J. Michael (2021). "JFK and Political Heroism". In McKinley, Maggie. Norman Mailer in Context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• — (2013). Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam.
• — (1966). Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dell.
• — (1972). Existential Errands. New York: Little, Brown.
• — (2013). "Love Buds". The Mailer Review. 7 (1): 17–22. Retrieved 2021-10-23.
• — (2020). Lennon, J. Michael; Lucas, Gerald R.; Mailer, Susan, eds. "Lipton's Journal". Project Mailer. The Norman Mailer Society. Retrieved 2021-09-13.
• — (2013). "Mind of an Outlaw". In Sipiora, Phillip. Mind of an Outlaw. New York: Random House. pp. 83–106.
• — (1963). The Presidential Papers. New York: Putnam.
• — (2014). Lennon, J. Michael, ed. Selected Letters of Norman Mailer. New York: Random House.
• — (1967). The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer. New York, N.Y.: Dell.
• Poirier, Richard (1972). Norman Mailer. Modern Masters. New York: Viking Press.
• Rollyson, Carl (1991). The Lives of Norman Mailer. New York: Paragon House.