Contributions by:

Erik Grayson

Remembering Norman Mailer

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In his introduction to a 2003 collection of essays devoted to the late Norman Mailer, Harold Bloom deems the author “the most visible of contemporary novelists,” echoing an ambivalence shared by many literary critics since Mailer first burst onto the scene with the publication of The Naked and the Dead in 1948 (1). His visibility,…

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A Man Without A Country, By Kurt Vonnegut

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When Kurt Vonnegut finally finished Timequake one decade ago, the exasperated writer claimed that he would never write another book. Technically, he still hasn’t. In 1999’s Bagombo Snuff Box, Vonnegut merely collected several short stories he’d previously written and in 2001’s God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, he simply published a few short pieces he’d performed…

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Review of Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller by Tracy Daugherty

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In many ways, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is the reason I majored in English as an undergraduate and, subsequently, attended graduate school to become an English professor. Put plainly, reading Catch-22 changed the course of my life more powerfully and definitively than nearly any other experience I’ve had before or since I first picked up the…

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Review: John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

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John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. (W.W. Norton, 2015).  Prior to his death in 1983, Tennessee Williams had twice designated Lyle Leverich, a San Francisco-based theater producer who had never written a book, as his authorized biographer, but those individuals controlling the Williams Estate were less enthusiastic. Thus, impressed with the success of…

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Mary Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2018)

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In the prologue to Ernest Hemingway: A Biography, Mary V. Dearborn recollects “ask[ing]…whether a woman could bring something to the subject that previous biographers had not” (7). Her question is, at least in part, a response to the looming presence of “the Hemingway legend” in the American imagination, an impression of the man as “the…

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