Consider Mailer’s appearances on The Dick Cavett Show - particularly the evening in 1971 when he sparred with Gore Vidal, threatening violence and belittling the studio audience once words failed him. There was a gleeful aggressiveness to the bad boys’ writing, and to the way they carried themselves. The novel was so provocative, that Roth, a Jewish-American writer, was denounced by rabbis for writing what they considered to be vile smut. Thompson and Norman Mailer, or even little Martin Amis, attacked the page with a masculine gusto that produced novels such as Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, a hilarious coming-of-age story that depicts the male libido in all its absurdity. Writers like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Hunter S. There was a time in the not-so-distant past when the literary scene was overflowing with bad boys.
On The Death and Rebirth of Masculine Fiction
