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Complete video at:
http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=1249
Internationally acclaimed author and
journalist Norman Mailer discusses his views
on national pride, the Iraq war, and American
Neoconservatives. This excerpt is taken from
a program in which Norman Mailer talks with
authors Gunter Grass and Andrew O'Hagan on
the topic of "The 20th Century on Trial," and
was recorded in collaboration with the New
York Public Library.
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The New York Public Library presents "The
20th Century on Trial" with Norman Mailer and
Gunter Grass.
Born in the 1920s, Gunter Grass and Norman
Mailer went on to become grand men of
letters. They witnessed the 20th century at
close quarters. At the center of each
writer's consciousness is the role of their
respective countries in World War II and the
legacy of violence and guilt that created the
Cold War. Yet as stylists these two novelists
appeared to internalize the great forces of
their times: the appeal of totalitarianism
and the cult of celebrity, the struggle for
national definition and the psychology of
sex.
Mailer and Grass set out to create
revolutions in the consciousness of their
times, and now might be the moment to ask how
the 20th century itself emerges from their
work. What was that century? What would they
write for its epitaph? Nobel Prize-Winner
Gunter Grass's memoir "Peeling the Onion"
takes him back to his wartime childhood and
adolescence - it is a searing book that
provides evidence on behalf of the
self-accusing. Norman Mailer's latest novel,
"The Castle in the Forest," is his take on
Hitler's own youth. These two great writers
have come full circle, to the same place and
time, and their creativity puts the 20th
century itself on trial - The New York Public
Library
Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007) was born to a
Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. He
was brought up in Brooklyn, New York,
graduated from Boys' High School and when he
was only sixteen was admitted to Harvard
University in 1939, where he studied
aeronautical engineering. At the university,
he became interested in writing and published
his first story when he was 18. Mailer was
drafted into the Army in World War II and
served in the South Pacific. In 1948, just
before enrolling in the Sorbonne in Paris, he
published a book that made him world-famous:
The Naked and the Dead, based on his personal
experiences during World War II. It was
hailed by many as one of the best American
novels to come out of the war years and named
one of the "100 best novels in English
language" by the Modern Library.
Other famous works include: The Presidential
Papers (1963), An American Dream (1965), Why
Are We in Vietnam? (1967), Armies of the
Night (1968, awarded a Pulitzer Prize and
National Book Award), Miami and the Siege of
Chicago (1968), Of a Fire on the Moon (1970),
The Prisoner of Sex (1971), Marilyn (1973),
The Fight (1975), The Executioner's Song
(1979, awarded a Pulitzer Prize), Ancient
Evenings (1983), Harlot's Ghost (1991),
Oswald's Tale (1995), and The Castle in the
Forest (2007).
In 1968 he received a George Polk Award for
his reporting in Harper's Magazine.
Norman Mailer passed away on November 10,
2007, at the age of 84.
Tags : bush republicans patriotism patriots love country journalism fascists fascism facists neocons pnac right politics forat |
