Thomas Wolfe and Norman Mailer: Kinsmen of the Land (Essay‪)‬

Norman Mailer, the legendary American novelist who died in November 2007, was part of that generation of ambitious writers who came of age in the postwar era, a time when the literary culture was heavily influenced by the towering legacy of Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe, along with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, James T. Farrell, and John Steinbeck, made a huge impact on the young Mailer. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), had Wolfean overtones in both the title (think of "The Quick and the Dead" chapter in The Hills Beyond (1)) and the work itself. In fact, Mailer long noted that two books--Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and Wolfe's Of Time and the River--were on his desk whenever he needed inspiration during the writing of that hugely successful novel. (2)