Lecture 5
The canon of the anti-racial works: Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird, Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man.
Racism is a belief system or doctrine which postulates a hierarchy among various human races or ethnic groups. It may be based on an assumption of inherent biological differences between different ethnic groups that purport to determine cultural or individual behaviour. Racism may be described as a strong form of ethnocentrism, including traits such as xenophobia (fear and hate of foreigners), views against interracial relationships (anti-miscegenation), ethnic nationalism, and ethnic stereotypes.
Racism has been a motivating factor in social discrimination, racial segregation, hate speech and violence (such as pogroms, genocides and ethnic cleansings). Racial discrimination is common, although illegal, in many states.
The term racist has been a pejorative term since at least the 1940s, and the identification of a group or person as racist is often controversial.
In the late 1950s, the US Supreme Court ruled the segregation of schools and buses to be unconstitutional. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 authorized federal intervention in cases where blacks were denied the chance to vote.
Harper Lee
Nelle Harper Lee (born April 28, 1926) is an American novelist, best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
Born in Monroeville, Alabama, Lee is the youngest of the four children of father Amasa Coleman Lee and mother Frances Finch Lee.
After graduating from high school in Monroeville, she attended the female Huntingdon College in Montgomery for only a year before transferring to law school at the University of Alabama in 1945, where she was a member of the Chi Omega sorority. While there, she wrote for several student publications and spent a year as editor of the campus humor magazine, Rammer-Jammer. Though she did not complete the requirements for a law degree, she pursued studies for a summer in Oxford, England, before moving to New York in 1950, where she worked as a reservation clerk with BOAC.
Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. The following month, at the East 50th townhouse of her friends Michael Brown and Joy Williams Brown, she received a gift with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." Within a year, she had a first draft. Working closely with J.B. Lippincott editor Tay Hohoff, she completed To Kill a Mockingbird in the summer of 1959. Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate bestseller and won her great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It remains a bestseller today and has earned a secure place in the canon of American literature. In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll conducted by the Library Journal.
Many details of To Kill a Mockingbird are apparently autobiographical. Like Lee, the tomboy Scout is the daughter of a respected small town Alabama attorney. The plot involves a legal case, the workings of which would have been familiar to Lee, who studied law. Scout's friend Dill is commonly supposed to have been inspired by Lee's childhood friend and neighbor, Truman Capote - while Lee is the model for a character in Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms.
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Since the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee has granted almost no requests for interviews or public appearances, and with the exception of a few short essays, has published no further writings. She did work on a second novel for years, eventually filing it away unpublished. During the mid-1980s, she began writing a book of nonfiction about an Alabama serial murderer, but she put it aside when she was not satisfied with the result.
Harper Lees cousin, Richard Williams, has asked the reclusive author when shes going to come out with another book. And she said, Richard, when youre at the top, theres only one way to go.
Lee said of the 1962 Academy Awardwinning screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird by Horton Foote: "If the integrity of a film adaptation can be measured by the degree to which the novelist's intent is preserved, Mr. Foote's screenplay should be studied as a classic."
When Lee attended the 1983 Alabama History and Heritage Festival in Eufaula, Alabama, she presented the essay "Romance and High Adventure".
Lee has been known to split time between an apartment in New York and her sister's home in Monroeville. She has accepted honorary degrees but has declined to make speeches. In March 2005, she arrived via Amtrak in Philadelphiaher first trip to the city since signing with publisher Lippincott in 1960to receive the inaugural ATTY Award for positive depictions of attorneys in the arts from the Spector Gadon & Rosen Foundation. At the urging of Peck's widow Veronique, Lee traveled by train from Monroeville to Los Angeles in 2005 to accept the Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award. She has also attended luncheons for students who have written essays based on her work held annually at the University of Alabama. On May 21, 2006, she accepted an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame. To honor her, the graduating seniors were given copies of Mockingbird before the ceremony and held them up when she received her degree.
In a letter published in Oprah Winfrey's magazine O (May 2006), Lee wrote about her early love of books as a child and her steadfast dedication to the written word: "Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books."
Harper Lee was portrayed by Catherine Keener in the film Capote (2005), by Sandra Bullock in the film Infamous (2006) and by Tracey Hoyt in the TV movie Scandalous Me: The Jacqueline Susann Story (1998). In the adaptation of Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1995), the character of Idabell Thompkins (Aubrey Dollar) is inspired by Truman Capote's memories of Harper Lee as a child.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1960 novel by Harper Lee, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. Lee's only novel, a coming of age novel, is told from the point of view of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, the young daughter of Atticus Finch, a lawyer in Maycomb, Alabama, a fictional small town in the Deep South of the United States. She is accompanied by her brother, Jem, and their mutual friend Dill.
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For a book to be accessible forty years after it was first published is close to miraculous. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is that rare book. Since its publication in 1960 it has never been out of print. And with good reason --- it is one of the finest novels written in this century, and one of the most widely celebrated and read.
Scout Finch lives with her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus, a middle-aged lawyer, in Maycomb county, Alabama. One summer, Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Charles Baker Harris (Dill), who has come to live in their neighborhood for the summer, and the trio acts out stories together. Eventually, Dill becomes fascinated with the spooky house on their street called the Radley House. The house was owned by Mr. Radley, who had two sons, Nathan, who takes over the household after Mr. Radley's death, and Arthur (nicknamed Boo), who has lived there for years without venturing outside in daylight. Boo is infamous for the rumors that abound about him in Maycomb County as a result of his reclusiveness, the two most famous being that he once stabbed his father in the leg on an impulse, and that he sneaks out of the house every night, eats squirrels, cats and puppies and lurks outside of people's houses.
Scout goes to school for the first time that fall and detests it. It is on her first day in class that she is forced to come into contact with the children of two men important later on in the story: Mr. Walter Cunningham, the poorest man in town, and Mr. Bob Ewell, an infamous drunk, layabout and ne'er-do-well who has built a house on the town dump. She and Jem find gifts apparently left for them in a knothole of a tree on the Radley property. Dill returns the following summer, and he, Scout, and Jem begin to act out the story of Boo Radley. Atticus puts a stop to their antics, urging the children to try to see life from another person's perspective before making judgments. But on Dill's last night in Maycomb for the summer, the three sneak onto the Radley property, where Nathan Radley shoots at them. Jem loses his pants in the ensuing escape. When he returns for them, he finds them mended and hung over the fence. The next winter, Jem and Scout find presents in a tree left mysteriously for them. Presumably left by the mysterious Boo, Boo's brother Nathan Radley eventually plugs the knothole with cement claiming it was "diseased".
To the consternation of Maycomb's racist white community, Atticus agrees to defend a black man named Tom Robinson, who has been accused of raping Mayella Ewell. Because of Atticus's decision, Jem and Scout are subjected to abuse from other children, even when they celebrate Christmas at the family compound on Finch's Landing. Calpurnia, the Finches' black cook, takes them to the local black church, where the warm and close-knit community largely embraces the children.
Atticus's sister, Alexandra, comes to live with the Finches the next summer. Dill, who is supposed to live with his "new father" in another town who hasn't paid enough attention to him, runs away and comes to Maycomb. Scout finds him hiding under her bed. Tom Robinson's trial begins, and when the accused man is placed in the local jail, a mob gathers to lynch him. Atticus faces the mob down the night before the trial. Jem, Dill, and Scout, who sneaked out of the house, soon join him. Scout recognizes one of the men as Walter Cunningham, father of one of her schoolmates, and her polite questioning about his son shames him into dispersing the mob.
At the trial itself, the children sit in the "colored balcony" with the town's black citizens. Atticus provides clear evidence that the accusers, Mayella Ewell and her father, Bob, are lying: in fact, Mayella propositioned Tom Robinson, was caught by her father, and then accused Tom of rape to cover her shame and guilt. Atticus provides impressive evidence that the marks on Mayella's face are from wounds that her father inflicted; upon discovering her with Tom, he called her a whore and beat her. Yet, despite the significant evidence pointing to Tom's innocence, the all-white jury convicts him. The innocent Tom later tries to escape from prison and is shot seventeen times, killing him. In the aftermath of the trial, Jem's faith in justice is badly shaken because of the unbelieveable verdict, and he lapses into despondency and doubt as Tom Robinson's verdict was chosen by the jury clearly because he was black.
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Despite the verdict, Bob Ewell feels that Atticus and the judge have made a fool out of him, and he vows revenge. He menaces Tom Robinson's widow, tries to break into the judge's house, spits in Atticus' face on a town street, and finally attacks Jem and Scout as they walk home from a Halloween pageant at their school. After a brief scuffle in the dark, in which Jem breaks his arm, Ewell disappears and Jem and Scout are discovered by an unnamed man and brought to their house. There, it is revealed that the man is, in fact, Boo Radley. The sheriff arrives with the news that Bob Ewell has died of a knife wound to the stomach; Atticus at first believes that Jem fatally stabbed Mr. Ewell in the struggle, but the sheriff insists that Ewell tripped over a tree root and fell on his own knife. It is evident (although unsaid) that Boo had actually intervened and killed Mr. Ewell to save the children; the sheriff wishes to protect the reclusive Boo, contrary to Atticus's belief, from the publicity certain to follow from the townspeople if they learned the truth of Boo's involvement. After sitting with Jem for a while, Scout is asked to walk Boo home. While standing on the Radley porch, Scout imagines many past events from Boo's perspective and feels sorry for him because she and Jem never gave him a chance, and never repaid him for the gifts that he had given them.
Walking home, she recalls all the events that have happened so far in the story (which have taken up about two or three years) and comes home to Atticus and a sedated Jem. While being tucked in, she remarks to Atticus that Boo Radley turned out to be a nice person; Atticus leaves her with the words: "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."
Themes
Courage is a central theme in To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee presents and contrasts two types of courage namely:
1. Real Courage - continuing with what you are doing even though you are fighting a losing battle, the most prominent example being Atticus Finch's decision to fight for Tom Robinson even though he will lose. Another example is Ms. Dubose's battle with her morphine addiction.
2. Fighting against ignorance and prejudice. The understanding of others is sometimes not enough; an act of bravery is demanded to try and prevent evil taking place and to subdue prejudice.
Another major theme is the destruction of beauty through selfishness, or circumstances beyond one's control. The title itself is derived from Atticus' warning to Jem that it is a sin to shoot mockingbirds, as all they do is create beauty.
Prejudice
Prejudice is another prominent theme in To Kill a Mockingbird. The most obvious one is racial prejudice. In chapter five; the mob wishes to prevent Tom Robinson getting a trial. Another form of prejudice is class prejudice. This is shown when Aunt Alexandra refuses Scouts request to invite the son of the farmer Cunningham saying "he is white trash".
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Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
The book was made into the well-received and Academy Award-winning film with the same title, To Kill a Mockingbird, in 1962.
This book has also been adapted as a play by Christopher Sergal.
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison (1913 1994) was a scholar and writer. He was born Ralph Waldo Ellison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). Research by Lawrence Jackson, Ellison's biographer, has established that he was born a year earlier than had been previously thought.
Invisible Man is a novel written by Ralph Ellison, developed from a short story that formed the novel's initial "Battle Royal" chapter. It was Ellison's only novel to be published during his lifetime, and it won him the National Book Award in 1953. It addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing the post-civil-war American Black identity, including the relationship between this identity and Marxism, black nationalism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington.
Invisible Man is narrated in the first person by the protagonist, an unnamed African American man who considers himself socially invisible. His character may have been inspired by Ellison's own life. The narrator may be conscious of his audience, writing as a way to make himself visible to mainstream culture; the book is structured as if it were the narrator's autobiography although it begins in the middle of his life.
In the Prologue, Ellison's narrator tells readers, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century. In this secret place, the narrator creates surroundings that are symbolically illuminated with 1,369 lights. He says, My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway." The protagonist explains that light is an intellectual necessity for him since "the truth is the light and light is the truth." From this underground perspective, the narrator attempts to make sense out of his life, experiences, and position in American society.
When published in 1952, Invisible Man excited a new way of looking at racial tensions within America, one that was unapologetic of its racial stand and unconvinced that racial equality was emerging. Ralph Ellisons prolific novel left a lasting effect on society, as seen in its traces from the Harlem Renaissance to the follow-up Black Arts Movement. The Harlem Renaissance sought to uplift the black race by offering a substantial amount of greatness in art and literature to the masses of America. Its primary goal was achieving social acceptance in society by building black unity, one grounded in expertise of sophisticated arts and literature. Though Ralph Ellison is seen as a Harlem Renaissance writer by many, the themes from Invisible Man break away from the movement's major theme of social acceptance and hope for the future. Invisible Man suggests that any foreseeable solution to race relations may not be as near as the dream has provided. On the same note, Invisible Man cannot entirely be viewed as black arts movement literature as its ideas about race aren't as militant and extreme as those of the 1960s and 70s black arts movement. Because of this Invisible Man is often seen as a transition between the two.
In the beginning of the book, the narrator lives in a small Southern town. He is a model black student, and is named his high school's valedictorian. Having written and delivered a successful speech about the requirement of humility for the black man's progress, he is invited to give his speech before a group of important white men. However, he is first forced to fight a humiliating "battle royal" with other blacks. The "battle royal" consists of the young black men from the community fighting in a boxing style ring while their white superiors watch in enjoyment. After finally giving his speech, he receives a briefcase containing a scholarship to a black college that is clearly modeled on Tuskegee Institute.
During his junior year at the college, the narrator is required to give Mr. Norton, a rich white trustee, a tour of the grounds. He accidentally drives to the house of Jim Trueblood, a black man living on the college's outskirts who accidentally impregnated his daughter while sleeping. Trueblood, though disgraced by his fellow blacks, has been supported by whites who wish to hold him up as an example of black inferiority. Mr. Norton wants to hear Trueblood's story, as the man disproves everything Norton once believed about the relationship between whites and blacks, and this experience causes Norton to faint, prompting the Invisible Man to take him to a local tavern in a misguided search for aid. At the Golden Day tavern, Norton passes in and out of consciousness as black veterans suffering from mental delusions occupy the bar and a fight breaks out among them. One of the veterans claims to be a doctor and tends to Mr. Norton. The dazed and confused Mr. Norton is not fully aware of whats going on, as the veteran doctor chastises the actions of the trustee and the young black college student. Through all the chaos, the narrator manages to get the recovered Mr. Norton back to the campus after a day of unusual events.
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Upon returning to the school he is fearful of the reaction of the day's incidents from college president Dr. Bledsoe. At any rate, insight into Dr. Bledsoe's knowledge of the events and the narrator's future at the campus is somewhat prolonged as an important visitor arrives. The narrator views a sermon by the highly respected Reverend Homer A. Barbee. Barbee, who is blind, delivers a speech about the legacy of the college's founder, with such passion and resonance that he comes vividly alive to the narrator; his voice makes up for his blindness. The narrator is so inspired by the speech that he feels impassioned like never before to contribute to the college's legacy. However, all his dreams are shattered as a meeting with Bledsoe reveals his fate. Fearing that the college's funds will be jeopardized by the incidents that occurred, college president Dr. Bledsoe immediately expels the narrator. While the Invisible Man once aspired to be like Bledsoe, he realizes that the man has portrayed himself as a black stereotype in order to succeed in the white-dominated society. This serves as the first epiphany among many in the narrator realizing his invisibility. This epiphany is not yet complete when Bledsoe gives him several letters of recommendation to help him find work in the north. Upon arriving in New York, the narrator learns that these letters instruct various friends of the school to assist Dr. Bledsoe in keeping the narrator deceived about his chances at returning to school - that is, help employ him, keep him otherwise occupied and away from the university.
He eventually gets a job in the boiler room of a paint factory in a company renowned for its white paints (an obvious racial reference). The man in charge of the boiler room, Lucius Brockway, is extremely paranoid and thinks that the narrator has come to take his job. He is also extremely loyal to the company's owner, who once paid him a personal visit. When the narrator tells him about a union meeting he happened upon, Brockway is outraged, and attacks him. They fight, not realizing that the boilers are about to explode. Brockway escapes, but the narrator is hospitalized after the blast. While hospitalized, the narrator overhears doctors discussing him as a mental health patient (or as the book suggests, simply a lab rat for their experiments). He learns through their discussion that shock treatment has been performed on him.
After the shock treatments the narrator attempts to return to his residence when he feels overwhelmed by a certain dizziness and faints on the streets of Harlem. He is taken to the residence of a kind, old-fashioned woman by the name of Mary. Mary is down-to-earth and reminds the narrator of his relatives in the South and friends at the college. Mary somewhat serves as a mother figure for the narrator.
No longer able to work at the factory, the narrator wanders the streets of New York. Eventually, he comes across an elderly couple being evicted from their apartment and gives an impromptu speech rallying by passers to their cause. The onlookers, angry at the marshal in charge of the eviction, charge past him and start a riot. His otherwise powerful speech brings him to the attention of the Brotherhood, an equality-minded organization with obvious communist undertones. Their leader, Brother Jack, who witnessed the speech and the riot, recruits him and begins training him as an orator, with the intention of uniting New York's black community.
The narrator is at first happy to be making a difference in the world, "making history," in his new job. He gives several successful speeches and is soon promoted to head the Brotherhood's work in Harlem. While for the most part his rallies go smoothly, he soon encounters trouble from Ras the Exhorter, a fanatical black nationalist who believes that the Brotherhood is controlled by whites. Ras tells this to the narrator and Tod Clifton, a youth leader of the Brotherhood, neither of whom seem to be swayed by his words.
Soon the narrator's name is all over Harlem, and a magazine calls to interview him. Though he tries to convince them to interview Tod Clifton instead, they insist upon him. When the article comes out, one brother criticizes him for taking personal credit for the work, instead of emphasizing the whole of the Brotherhood. Though his work has been impeccable, the Brotherhood's ruling committee decides to take him out of Harlem and set him to work in a new part of town.
When he returns to Harlem, Tod Clifton has disappeared. When the narrator finds him, he realizes that Clifton has succumbed to Ras' point of view, and has quit the brotherhood in order to sell dancing Sambo dolls on the street, mocking the organization he once believed in. He is shot to death by a police officer in a scuffle. At Clifton's funeral, the narrator rallies crowds to win back his former widespread Harlem support and delivers a rousing speech, but he is censured by the Brotherhood for praising a man who would sell such dolls.
Walking along the street one day, the narrator is spotted by Ras and roughed up by his men. He buys sunglasses and a hat as a disguise, and is mistaken for a man named Rinehart in a number of different scenarios: first as a lover, then a hipster, a gambler, a briber, and at last a reverend. He sees that Rinehart has adapted to white society, at the cost of his own identity. This causes the narrator to see that his own identity is not of importance to the Brotherhood, but only his blackness. He decides to take his grandfather's dying advice and "yes" the Brotherhood to death, by making it appear that the Harlem membership is thriving when in reality it is crumbling.
The novel ends with a massive Harlem race riot, fueled by anger over Clifton's death and the tension between the Brotherhood and the followers of Ras. Riding a horse in full tribal regalia, Ras orders the narrator hanged and throws a spear at him. The narrator hurls the spear back, piercing Ras' cheek. He now realizes that even in trying to subvert the Brotherhood, he has only aided its white-controlled interests in helping to start a race riot that will generate sympathy and propaganda for the organization. Blinded by his epiphany, the narrator runs away, and is soon accosted by a group of men for his briefcase. He once again flees and the narrator falls down a manhole, where he is taunted by his pursuers. Rather than try to escape, he decides to make a new life for himself underground, invisible. As mentioned at the beginning of the story, he taps an electric wire running into the building so he can power his collection of 1,369 bulbs in the basement, hidden from the power company. His theft of power from a white-controlled company, and new rent-free residence under a white-only building, are symbols of his invisible rebellion against white society.
Major themes
Ellison uses numerous metaphors, images, and allusions to enhance the emotional and intellectual impact of his novel. For instance, Ellison invokes the colors of the American flag with red of sloe gin, the Optic White of Liberty Paints factory, and the blue of "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue?" by Louis Armstrong. Ellison also uses the language of music throughout the novel to characterize the deeper meaning of a scene. Armstrong's jazz, the street blues of Peter Wheatstraw (Peetie or Pete Wheatstraw was the stagename of blues singer William Bunch), and a heartfelt solo by a gospel singer all become central metaphors for interpreting the message behind Ellison's meandering and sometimes surreal plot.
Another allusion used by Ellison occurs after the main character discovers he has been deceived by the school master, which subsequently leads him to acquire an interim occupation at Liberty Paints. At his new job, the character is instructed to add ten drops of "stuff" to a can full of jet black paint. After the paint is shaken, the main character peers into the can and beholds a "pure white" paint. This allusion hints at the mindset of Americans at those times, an addition of ten drops of indoctrination to the African-American soul can instill in him the love of white America; or it could illustrate that what is considered "pure white" isn't exclusively white. This is also a vague reference to Jim Crow-era laws that were based on the percentage of "black blood" one had in order for such to apply.
A motif of blindness also runs through the novel, often alongside the metaphor of light as truth and knowledge. For example, the Reverend Homer A. Barbee, a speaker who comes to the Narrator's school, and whose story glorifies Dr. Bledsoe and the purpose to the school (a purpose the Narrator finds to be false and subservient to the white benefactors), is blind. Perhaps his blindness can be seen as an indicator of the school's blindness, or even the blindness of the Narrator before he learned to despise the school. Later in the novel, the Narrator discovers that Brother Jack, whom he had revered and respected as a true visionary, is blind in one eye, thereby losing philosophical respect for the brother who, he comes to learn, used him as a poster-boy to earn the support of Harlem.
The fact that Brother Jack only has one eye can also be seen as a reference to the cyclops in Homer's Odyssey. In fact, Invisible Man contains numerous references to the Odyssey, both cyclopean, and other. For example, during the 'Battle Royal' scene, when the Narrator faces the dancing white woman, she is described as "a fair bird-girl girdled in veils calling to me from the angry surface of some gray and threatening sea." in other words, she is described as a Greek siren, a bird with a woman's head who sings from a rock at sea in order to lure sailors to their deaths. As the title suggests, the importance of invisibility is also a major theme in the text. While the narrator often bemoans his state of invisibility, there are a number of advantages to it as well that allow him to remain undetected and inconspicuous.
The war experience: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, From Here to Eternity and Just Call by James Jones, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut, Sophies Choice by William Styron.
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 November 10, 2007) is an American novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the personal essay to the nonfiction novel. He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Mailer 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 attended Harvard University in 1939, where he studied aeronautical engineering. He is a former member of the Harvard Advocate. 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 wrote 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" by the Modern Library.
In the following years, Mailer continued to work in the field of the novel. Barbary Shore (1951) was a surreal parable of Cold War left politics, set in a Brooklyn rooming-house. His 1955 novel The Deer Park drew on his experiences working as a screenwriter in Hollywood in the early 1950s. It was initially rejected by numerous publishers owing to its sexual content. But in the mid-1950s, he became increasingly known for his counter-cultural essays. He was one of the founders of The Village Voice in 1955. In the book Advertisements for Myself (1959), including the essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (1957), Mailer examined violence, hysteria, crime and confusion in American society, in both fictional and reportage forms.
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.
In addition to his experimental fiction and nonfiction novels, Mailer has produced a play version of The Deer Park, and in the late 1960s directed a number of improvisational avant-garde films in a Warhol style, including Maidstone (1970), which includes a brutal brawl between himself and Rip Torn that may or may not have been planned. In 1987, he directed a film version of his novel Tough Guys Don't Dance, starring Ryan O'Neal, which has become a minor camp classic.
A number of Mailer's nonfiction works, such as The Armies of the Night and The Presidential Papers, are political. He covered the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1992, and 1996. In 1967, he was arrested for his involvement in anti-Vietnam demonstrations. Two years later, he ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic Party primary for Mayor of New York City, allied with columnist Jimmy Breslin (who ran for City Council President), proposing New York City secession and creating a 51st state.
He currently lives in Provincetown, MA.
The Naked and the Dead is a 1948 novel, by Norman Mailer. It is based on his experiences during World War II. It was later adapted into a movie of the same title in 1958.
An American brigade is fighting the Japanese on a Pacific island. Set in the South Pacific and dealing primarily with a single reconnaissance platoon of riflemen, the novel contains several combat scenes, but focuses on the psychological portraits of the men in the squad. The tension of the novel derives mostly from the conflict between officers and men, including the lieutenant of the squad and the men under him as well as his superiors. The novel questions the impact of high-ranking officers and their decisions on the outcomes of military campaigns.
The Naked and the Dead was Mailer's first published novel and his only hugely successful one; it established his reputation as a novelist and brought international recognition.
JAMES JONES 1921-1977
James Jones, one of the major novelists of his generation, is known primarily as the author of fiction that probes the effects of World War II on the individual soldier.
James Jones was born in Robinson, in the state of Illinois. For several years James Jones lived in the Hawaii where he studied at the University of Honolulu. Later on he went to the New York University from which he graduated in 1945. During the years of 1939-1944 Jones served in the Pacific with the USA Army. He took part in World War II, got wounded at Guadalcanal, and was awarded the order of The Purple Heart and the Silver Star. He returned to Robinson, where he started to write about his experiences. After shelving his unpublished first novel, They Shall Inherit the Laughter, Jones completed the critically acclaimed international bestseller From Here to Eternity (1951).
Jones had never written seriously until after he joined the regular Army. In his works he described the routines of American Army life, the treatment of the men aimed at making them obedient mechanical cogs of the dehumanizing war machine. His military experience furnished the background and provided the material and facts for his works. James Jones' novel From Here to Eternity is among the best books of the post-war period. It is a naturalistic undisguised presentation of peacetime Army life in Hawaii on the eve of the Pearl Harbour attack. The novel aroused stormy criticism. Some readers admired the book, others were shocked by its lurid language and the deplorable, scandalous events.
From Here to Eternity. The events described in the novel take place in the Hawaii and refer to the period immediately preceding the Pearl Harbour attack. The book gives a brutal and almost ugly picture of Army life there. It is socially and politically significant as the servicemen are endowed with traits and features characteristic of their civilian compatriots.
The central figure of the novel is private Robert Lee Prewitt. The ways of Army life prove to be especially painful and unbearable to him as he is a sensitive man with a strongly developed sense of proper pride, a romantic sense of personal honor and an overdeveloped sense of justice. His philosophy is to fight for the rights of the underdog.
Prewitt, or Prew, as they call him in the company, was born in the Kentucky mountains, the son of a miner. When his mother was dying she made her son promise that he would never hurt anyone "unless it's absolute a must, unless you just have to do it." He never broke the death-bed promise to his mother and kept his integrity intact to his last breath.
Prew was a gifted person, but he had no call for anything until the first time he handled a bugle. After his enlistment Prew had much success with the bugle, he was a member of the Bugle Corps, soon became the best bugler in the Regiment. His art was excellent, and he was selected to play Taps in Arlington, on the Memorial Day (May 30). He also became famous as a boxer and the commandment were proud to have such a soldier in the outfit. His rating was Private First Class and Fourth Class Specialist. After the end of the 1st hitch he re-enlisted for 3 years more. Robert E. Lee Prewitt loves not so much the army but the masculinity of barracks life. He wants to be a thirty-year-man because the raw violence, the drunken sprees, the sex without responsibility, the demands on physical endurance and technical skill express and challenge his maleness. Prewitt's war with the army is touched off by a breach of the freedom he expects in return for his loyalty and service as a soldier.
Prewitt had the bad luck to fall ill and was sent to the hospital for the treatment. When he returned to the outfit after two month absence he had lost his position. His pride was hurt when an inferior Bugler was promoted above him. Prewitt asked to be transferred to another outfit. After he refused pointblank to ever take part in a fight, he was sent to the kitchen, where his work was hard and humiliating, though he never complained. In a skirmish with a drunken sergeant, his senior, who wanted to stab Prewitt with a knife, he took him on, and the Tribunal sent him to the Stockade. In keeping with his life philosophy Prewitt did not mention the knife at the trial, which would have saved him from imprisonment. After three months in the Stockade Prew came out but didn't return to the barracks; he became a deserter. He missed his comrades, he felt homesick for his outfit. After the Pearl Harbour air raid of the Japanese planes his decision to return to the regiment was made. He wanted to steal to the barracks under cover of night. A patrol car traced his movements and taking him for a spy shot him at a short distance from his regiment. Prewitts history is an eloquent paean to a concept of individualism rapidly becoming anachronistic in an increasingly bureaucratic society. Milt Warden, the co-protagonist of the novel, embodies in his personality the masculine world of the enlisted man. He equates his integrity with the existence of the enlisted man, and when he falls in love with the company commander's wife, Karen, and finally refuses the commission which would make her permanently available to him, he preserves his integrity and his individualism. He does not sell out to the bureaucracy or to women. At the end of the novel, Prew is dead, but Warden drinks and brawls on the way to Mrs. Kipfer's brothel as the Lurline sails from Hawaii with Karen aboard.
His other work, Some Came Running (1957), a long panoramic novel about a soldier, who came home from the war, is set in a Midwestern town at the time between World War II and the Korean War. It's also the story of love, the theme which Jones was unable to handle. The love affair in Some Came Running between the writer Dave and the teacher Gwen borders on the ludicrous. A college professor of English, Gwen has developed a naive thesis about the relation of frustration in love and artistic creativity. When Dave, one of the writers about whom she has been theorizing, returns to his small midwestern hometown, Gwen immediately falls in love with him. Dave, who hates the town, has returned for a visit only to embarrass his brother. But after one meeting with Gwen, who has an undeserved reputation as a woman of the world, Dave decides to settle in the town until he succeeds in seducing her. After a visitor two, he is passionately in love with Gwen. The couple never do get together because the thirty-eight-year-old Ph.D. in literature would prefer to lose the man she loves rather than admit to him that she is still a virgin! The forty-year-old Dave, who has had plenty of experience with women, decides that Gwen will not sleep with him because she is a nymphomaniac! The interminable philosophical digressions on life and love that inflate the novel are equally sophomoric. James Jones fictional terrain is limited to that peculiar all-male world governed by strictly masculine interests, attitudes, and values. Into this world, no female can step without immediately altering its character. The female must remain on the periphery of male life - a powerful force in male consciousness, but solely as a provocative target for that intense sexual need that has nothing to do with procreation or marriage.
The Pistol (1959) is the story of an Army private who accidentally gets a pistol that comes to be his symbol of safety in war. The Thin Red Line (1962) is another war novel dealing with the life of a U. S. infantry company on Guadalcanal in 1942-1943 but its attitudes and theme belong to the 1960s. The title itself is a reflection of the main theme; it symbolizes the uncertainty of the borderline between sanity and insanity, between man and beast, life and death. In battle, the company, made up of platoons, which are made up of squads, is deployed by the battalion commander according to a pre-established plan of attack. The battalions in the regiment are deployed by the regimental commander. The regiments are deployed by the division commander; the divisions deployed by the army commander, and the armies deployed all over the globe by a staff in Washington, D.C. Within this hierarchy, which gets larger and larger as it moves up the chain and farther and farther from the battle lines, the fighting soldier is a grain of sand on a beach encircling the globe. When the men see wounded and dead for the first time they are shocked and horrified. During their first battle, they react intensely to the suffering and death of their comrades. But as the fighting continues, the dead bodies of their fellow-soldiers no longer really bother them, and they lose all compunction about killing enemy soldiers. The starving Japanese prisoners are treated inhumanly, but only because the combat situation has revealed to their captors the insignificance of the individual human life except to the being who possesses it.
Jones vision of human existence is brutal and unsentimental, and he conveys it with superb artistry. His story of battle is fast-paced, tightly structured, painfully realistic. James Jones's fictional terrain is limited, but within that limited area he has presented a frightening twentieth-century view of individual man's insignificance in society and in the universe.
Just Call. His novel Just Call is the reflection of life of the lost generation. The four central characters Strange, Landers, Winch and Prell are recovering in the hospital from physical and psychological damage the war inflicted on them. The burden of their hard experience tells upon their fate. Prell dies in the quarrel, Winch finishes his life by suicide in the psychiatric department of the hospital, Landers leaves the hospital and is run over by the car ten steps away from the hospital. Strange, after recovering, goes back to war in Europe. But the prospect of future life horrifies him. He comes to the railings on the deck of the ship, intentionally leans over, and falls into the cold pit of ocean blackness.
His other novels are Go to the Widow-Maker (1967), The Marry Month of May (1971), A Touch of Danger (1973), and Whistle (1978). Jones published an acclaimed short-story collection, The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories (1968), a nonfictional history of World War II from the viewpoint of the soldier, World War II (1975), and a book of essays, Viet Journal (1975). Jones also published short fiction and articles throughout his adult life.
