kip -
i read executioner's song whenever it was published -late 70s
- and found a nice tie-in in dreiser's american tragedy.
mailer certainly has opted for money as opposed to art, but
executioner's song is a well-written and insightful book.
sort of 'found art.' hey -i was born in 1955 too.
At 04:30 PM 1/5/2000 -0600, you wrote:
>Born in '55 (sheesh, Eisenhower's FIRST term in
office). Read Bobbsy (sp?)
>Twins and Hardy Boys as a young, young boy (ah, the
wonderful old Carnegie
>Library in Guthrie, Oklahoma), then progressed on to
all the Sherlock
Holmes in
>junior high. Also read all the James Bond books about
that time, plus some
>Spillane. Got really snooty in high school, only
reading Hemingway,
Fitzgerald,
>Faulkner etc. Got even snootier when I went off to
college to major in
English
>-- Updike, Bellow, Welty, Oates, Heller, and so
forth. A few things
happened at
>once: I read Walker Percy's LANCELOT, which is an
existential crime
novel. I
>read Norman Mailer's AN AMERICAN DREAM, another
existential crime novel
(and a
>great one, IMHO) that I think owes a great deal to
hard-boiled writers. I
saw
>the film version of THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? on
TV and shortly
thereafter
>found a paperback edition of the novel plus the
screenplay. Then my
mother gave
>me a copy of John D.'s THE DREADFUL LEMON SKY and I
read a good profile of
>MacDonald by Rust Hill in ESQUIRE. Then an amigo lent
me THE LONG GOODBYE
and
>said it might be the REAL great American novel (I'm
not sure I disagree).
Then
>I read Capote's and Mailer's "nonfiction" true crime
novels (IN COLD BLOOD
and
>EXECUTIONER'S SONG, respectively). Finally, one day I
had a moment of
epiphany
>and realized that Charles Willeford is a more
important writer than Saul
Bellow.
>Next the reprints of the novels of my Oklahoma
homeboy Jim Thompson began to
>appear (POP 1280 is the best depiction of small town
Oklahoma I've ever read)
>and I became a confirmed low-brow.
>
>
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