Tuesday, November 27, 2007

An American Dream -- Norman Mailer

I meant to post this a while back, when Mailer died, but my copy of the book was in storage. Now that I've retrieved it, I want to post the opening paragraph, which had stuck with me, though not verbatim, for nearly 40 years.

I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to congress. We went out one night on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.

Don't you just have to read on?

5 comments:

Graham Powell said...

Off topic: how do you track where your books are stored? Do you paste a list on the outside of the box, or what?

Unknown said...

Track? Hahahahahahahaaha!

Anonymous said...

http://www.librarything.com/

Except you have sit down and enter everything. Which also means going through storage to find everything. So why bother?

Unknown said...

Exactly.

Anonymous said...

Norman Mailer was just a little TOO manly if you ask me. Like as though it was just really very important to him that everyone be really clear that he was clearly very manly. Hemingway was another one. Just a wee bit too much emphasis on his manly man ness. The both of them just kinda like making the point over and over, just to make sure nobody had any doubts about it. Did they do it to the point of creepyness?...yeah, I'd say so.