Research Of Norman Mailer's Nonfiction Novels

Norman Mailer (1923-2007) is a famous American writer, galloping American literary sixty years, has made remarkable achievement, and his nonfiction novels won the Pulitzer prize twice. Foreign researches for Mailer and his works research began much earlier and more in-depth, had acquired considerable number and higher quality academic achievements. Instead, domestic research started in the late 1970s. Most of the researches focus on the interpretation of single work, creation methods summary and Mailer's existentialism, but the attentions to his nonfiction novel is not enough. The researches, mainly concentrating in theme and skills of a single novel, more concerns about the digestion and reconstruction of history by fictionality, than systematic elaboration of the creation background and uniqueness of his nonfiction novels. This paper is going to do systematic combing of Mailer's nonfiction writings in four aspects:the background of mailer transformation to nonfiction novel creation, uniqueness of the works, forming causes and significance.Mailer began to write the nonfiction novels in the 1960s, background of that special age and pressures from writing career mainly prompted him to the creative transformation. Mailer's non fictional novels have their own uniqueness. The real materials and real space-time frame reflects objective the realities, while, the traditional realism literary truthfulness is deconstructed by plenty of novel techniques. And, the novel always has strong autobiography color with exposing creation intention and implying author's voice in it. The reasons of unique writing features are not simple. First, the reporter experience supplied him rich resource and made him suspicious of the objectivity and affected of new journalism. Secondly, Mailer's character is of duality, which he used to concentrated the complexity of the external world into personal psychological experience, and formed his personal writing style. Because of the continuous attention and reveal to the social problems of America, Mailer's nonfiction novels have more social significance. As a practice of post-modernist culture, his nonfiction novels suspect the history, challenges the traditional idea.