spokesman for his times

SPOKESMAN FOR HIS TIMES

I read the L.A. Times synopsis of Norman Mailer’s literary career, and I thought no, it isn’t true, he wasn’t the spokesman for the times he lived in. He was a spokesman for a privileged class that is broader than you might think. The privileged take the sting out of the raw misery of the multitude by filtering it through the clever minds of people like Mailer, handy with a pen.

Jack Henry Abbott came closer to what’s really going on in his book In the Belly of the Beast. Mailer stabbed someone, he went free. Abbott stabbed someone, he went back to prison where he’d already spent most of his life since the age of nine.

Anyone they give the Nobel Prize in Literature to is an apologist.

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