Sunday, November 11, 2007
Norman Mailer, RIP
NPR has a broad and informative retrospective on Normal Mailer, Co-founder of the Village Voice, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award, and, very near to my heart, the person considered to be the first to write creative nonfiction. I like NPR’s definition: “appl[ing] the narrative style of the novel to real events”.
Regular posts will begin again soon, regular like you haven’t seen in years. It should be a good thing.
Update Monday morning aka The continuing education of Mintjelly:
I received an informative comment via email from a former editor at The Voice, regarding the whole “first to write creative nonfiction” issue:
“Not to sound like an old guy quibbling, but I don’t think you can say he was the first person to do creative non-fiction. Could probably say he was the first novelist to utilize fictional techniques in the way that he did. But the real New Journalism, ie creative non-fiction, groundbreakers in that period were Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gail Sheehy and Clay Felker at NEW YORK magazine (where all three worked.)
Even Mailer’s non-fiction sort of transcended the genre, and unlike Wolfe, Breslin and Sheehy he wasn’t a model for young writers of non-fiction because you couldn’t aspire to be him stylistically or intellectually. He was a near-genius novelist who was out of reach of mere journalists, even ‘creative’ ones.”
Thank you, Quibble, very educational and interesting. Maybe you can’t learn everything in school and from NPR after all?
Maybe when we die, we get credit for things we’re only partially responsible for. For instance, I started the “pink” trend a number of years ago, before you could buy pink things. I coined the phrase Hacking the Body, and I made chipped nail polish cool. (legal note: When I die, I want a Viking funeral. Push me out to sea to the tune of “And She Was” by Talking Heads. If someone says “this is what she would have wanted” the appropriate response is “heck yeah")
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