A lot of what you wrote about Norman Mailer and his writing was on target (I remember an article about Mailer that quoted one of his ex-wives who noted that for all of his macho bluster, he was basically a mama’s boy; “all we ever did was have dinner with his mother”).

But although he was something of a literary celebrity, his influence on even left-wing thinking and writing in this country was pretty limited; however much he may have impressed the 30ish, male magazine editors in New York, on most college campuses, he was regarded as a middle-aged has-been trying to muscle in on The Action and the girls (I have this on good authority of two English teachers of mine over the years, both of whom described themselves as fairly radical during their 60′s college days, and both of whom thought of Mailer as a gassy, horny fraud). If there WAS a middle-aged writer who appealed to the pseudo revolutionaries, it was Kurt Vonnegut, who wasn’t a terribly deep thinker either, but was a lot more modest and one hell of a lot more readable.

As for me, the moment when I realized that my lack of respect for Mailer was on fairly strong ground came in an interview connected with the writing of THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG. He loftily announced that he hadn’t written much about the two men that Gary Gilmore killed because they were “very good,” which struck me as code for “very boring.” In short, Mailer lacked the literary talent to make good, quiet people as interesting as violent, messy ones. If Mailer hoped that this book would be his equivalent of IN COLD BLOOD, then he had fallen very short. Whatever its other imperfections, Truman Capote made the Clutter family as vivid in his book as the two men who killed them,