Norman Mailer's chest-thumping machismo, his clownish behavior and even his occasional acts of violence have tended, through the years, to confuse his admirers and inflame his detractors. Among the more notorious incidents and controversies (and there have been many) are his head-butt of Gore Vidal on "The Dick Cavett Show," the stabbing of one wife with a penknife, his drunken confession of urinating on the bathroom floor in a speech before a crowd assembled to march on the Pentagon and his frank contempt for his own "lazy audience" in his short-lived column for the Village Voice--prompting one reader to write in, "This guy Mailer. He's a hostile, narcissistic pest. Lose him."

Mailer was, alas, less intellectually iconoclastic than his reputation suggests. Too often he was simply vulgar--particularly in his observations about homosexuals, women and people of color. Mailer frequently baited homosexuals in print, condemning them as symptomatic of the loss of virility in America. Masculinity, he insisted, was something that had to be earned, often at the expense of others. Nowhere is this more evident than in his volatile relations with the sex he professed to admire. In his infamous attack on the feminist critic Kate Millet in "The Prisoner of Sex" (1971), Mailer claims that "man's sense of awe before . . . women made {him} detest {them}, revile them, humiliate them, defecate symbolically upon them . . . so that one might dare to enter them."

On the question of race, he was no better. In "The White Negro" (1959), Mailer argued that the role of the proletariat as the agent of history had been usurped in America by the white hipster who borrowed his cultural style from the Negro: "Hated from outside and therefore hating himself, the Negro was forced into the position of exploring all those moral wildernesses of civilized life . . . and in the worst of perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash . . . the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom" that the hipster could appropriate as his own. Crude and reductionistic, it is hard to read "The Prisoner of Sex" and "The White Negro" without concluding that they are elaborate charades, bad jokes that will be acknowledged at any moment. But Mailer drones on, utterly convinced by his arguments (which he has since qualified, but never entirely rejected). It is a measure of the times and Mailer's reputation that these essays were taken seriously by many of his readers.