Also, shockingly, I’m pretty sure you can be a writer without having read every single other writer, shocking as it@may be to some.
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he was no Dostoyevsky, that's for sure
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This is nutty. I'm an older Millennial and of course I've heard of Mailer. Why, I've even read him. And yeah, his political essays are really good.
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I've read lots of Mailer (most of the non-fiction, some of the novels) & like some of it a lot but I do think for various reasons he's out of fashion (Bookscan backs me up on this). And there's nothing wrong with that.
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This GenXer read Armies of the Night just a year or two ago. It's quite something!
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The 1960s/1970s nonfiction is the best & if I had edited the Library of American volumes I would've dumped the novels and just had those 5 or 6 books.
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I hold a PhD in 20th-century American lit. I’ve read a lot of Mailer; his novels are uniformly bad to the point of being unreadable. His essays haven’t held up as well as Baldwin’s. (Didion’s novels are better than her journalism.)
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This entire exchange is barf-worthy
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Millennial, but I deliberately AVOIDED Mailer because of all the ppl like this guy who were always going on about how great he was. Same for most ~midcentury~ prestige-writers, honestly.
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Speaking as one in that category, I can say: a) read Mailer I think, but I can't recall (I never did read his books, just some excerpts in a class, like as not) b) Read a little Didion, c) Read more Baldwin
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TBH, a lot of the writers who were supposed to be great (usually on the strength of New Yorker pieces) didn't wow the heck out of me, but some of that is probably that it seemed self-consciously "writerly" if that makes sense. Dunno how I'd see them now.
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