When American Writers Had Grit

David Mikics weighs in on the current cancel Mailer controversy. He writes:

Mailer saw into the deep fissures of Sixties America. Some of these divisions are still here today, like the one between a progressive college-educated elite and an underclass that cares far more about bread-and-butter issues than about the involuted theorizing of elites. He saw how ferociously white working-class America hated the hippies who opposed the Vietnam War. There was a huge gulf in experience between the working class and the protesters, who, university-bred as they were, had never fired a gun, fixed a car, or gotten into a fight over a girl. Mailer would have hated today’s wokists and woke terminology for the way it forces human complexity into ready-made pigeonholes, mimicking the corporate bureaucracy that Mailer disliked so much.

Read the whole article on Arabiya News:

When American writers had grit

For decades, Norman Kingsley Mailer ruled the literary world. No writer did a better job of describing the Sixties than the pugilistic Mailer—a colossus on

Al Arabiya English,David Mikics