Amen. I always thought he embodied the very worst of American intellectual pretension in much the way the despicable Harold Pinter did in Britain.

Hear, hear. Never liked a single thing Mailer wrote. He got where he was by being fashionable among the New York liberal crowd, and he never wrote a single thing which didn't agree with their worldview.

Which criticism could probably be applied to Pinter and London as well, come to think of it.

Take a common subject. For example, men who commit horrible crimes, are convicted and sent to death row, and are then executed.

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is rightly considered a truly brilliant book.

Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song takes twice as many pages to, maybe, 1/10th the effect.

Mailer was a hack and none of his books will be remembered in the future.

Never managed to read one thing he ever wrote all the way through, before throwing it across the room in disgust.

In total agreement with Perry and Kim (although I find London somewhat less execrable)

Mailer and Pinter were two buttocks of the same ass. I try and avoid speaking ill of the dead, but in those two cases, I'm quite prepared to make exceptions.

London was not dull.

Well, it's not Lear on Goneril but it's a pretty good rant.

I, too, find Mailer (and most other 'Establishment' authors) tedious. Amusingly, the 20th Century authors most likely to endure are those the literati look down on as trivial; the Heinleins, Spillanes and so forth. And I'm almost certain that if anyone's studying 20th Century movies in the 23rd Century, it'll be as an aid to reading Pratchett.

Mailer always fancied himself as a tough guy; of the Street-and-Alley type, ready for a rumble on any occasion.

He boxed a little. Or said he did. Sometimes I thought he had been hit too often. That was more true of his magazine stories.

But there is a partial explanation for the magazine work he did in recent decades. Most of it was done during an era when magazines were incredibly sloppy about editing. And for mags in awe of big-name writers. Mailer could have sent them a phone book, said it was about dragons, and had it published.

He did some good work, very good. But mostly he won the lottery, he produced at the right time for huge (someone said it only seems like NaKed goes on forever) WW2 novels. Novels at least moderately good by young men who photographed well.

Compare Mailer on war to William Manchester's "Goodbye Darkness."

This raises an interesting question- which authors will be remembered as 'the' authors of the twentieth century? Just as Dickens will be remembered in any top ten from the 19th, who will still be read 100 years from now? I think Heinlein will last, and Tolkein, and King. Who else?

One would hope that Daphne du Maurier would make the cut, but she's not sufficiently self-important. Ditto John D. MacDonald.

Vacuous fools like Maya Angelou, and the ghastly Thomas Pynchon will, I fear, feature prominently.

My list: John Steinbeck, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, John O'Hara, James Michener, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, W.B. Yeats, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Truman Capote, Anthony Burgess, Arthur Miller, Isaac Asimov, Daphne du Maurier, James Jones, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Joseph Heller, E.L. Doctorow, Somerset Maugham, Roald Dahl, Tom Wolfe, David Mamet, P.G. Wodehouse, Aldous Huxley, Agatha Christie, William Golding, Alistair Maclean, Iris Murdoch, J.K. Rowling, Tom Stoppard, Larry Niven.

I suppose I have to include James Joyce, even though I found Finnegan's Wake unreadable and not worth the bother.

One would find in a library stocked with just the above a rich harvest indeed.

Who will be remembered?

Sadly the universities and schools (and remember school teachers get their ideas from their training in universities) have a lot of influence on this - and that means the left has a lot of influence.

I remember the late Chris Tame explaining to me that not only had every single leftist doctrine been refuted at the time it was pushed out into the world (and that the refutations had often been much better written than the "classic" leftist works they proved to be nonsense), but also that there were many conservative and libertarian fiction writers in past times - and that that wrote very well.

"Well they did not sell Chris" I replied, in my ignorance.

"Not true [came the reply] - often, at the time, they outsold the leftist writers, but the collectivists have vast influence on what is considered the important work of various past periods, so modern students often hear nothing of writers the left oppose".

This is not true all the time - if a writer is really considered one of the all time greats then the left find it hard to shove them down the memory hole. However, many good past writers (at least as good as the writers who are kept in public view) have been shoved down the memory hole. When they are mentioned at all they are distorted - for example Hartley's "Facial Justice" is described as a "satirical attack on the medical profession" whereas, in reality, it is an attack on "Social Justice".

Of course in politics, economics and philosophy (subjects I am interested in) it would not take much to destroy the memory of modern British pro freedom writers - as they are not in the book shops or the libraries even now (so the left do not have to work to remove them).

Even in literature the tradition of anti "liberal" (in the modern sense) literature appears to be dead in Britain. For example a poet like Philip Larkin could not get published these days. In the United States things got nasty in a much more early period - for example even well established writers found it was very difficult to get novels attacking socialism published. For example, even the very successful creator of "Tarzan" (spelling alert) found he could not get his anti socialist"Under the Red Flag" published - so he had to disguise it as a SF work and set it (with a new title) on Mars.

These days there are special publishers (set up after World War II) in the United States that anti "Progressive" writers can turn to. But, I repeat, anti "liberal" literature appears to be dead in Britain.

However, other people know more of these matters than I do - so they may be able to add more hopeful information.

I can not resist citing the Ayn Rand quote on these matters.

I being chided for being "outside the mainstream of modern American literature" the lady replied that, whatever problems she saw in her writing (and Rand did see weaknessess in her own work), being outside the mainstream of modern American literature did not worry her.

For the modern mainstream of American literature was "a stangant swamp".

On the positive side Rand also used publishing as proof of her view of the existance of heroic people in business.

When told (endlessly) that such people did not exist (perhaps could not exist - as business "depends on getting along with the people in positions of power - making deals and so on") Rand just pointed out the fact of the publishing of her works and those of others before her.

"they do" - the heros do exist, otherwise such works would not be published, as people who publish them face the risk of their lives being destroyed (being frozen out of all "respectable" company - with all the commercial impact that has).

In an ideal world it would not take heros to publish works that will "sell very well" as Mr Miller (of a respected New York publishing house) sneered at Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" (in a letter to W.T. Crouch of the Univerity of Chicago Press - in an effort to get him to join the informal agreement of the respectable publishers not to publish Road to Serfdom). But in our world it does.

In the publishing business there are some heros in the United States (not enough perhaps, but some), here there are not.

"I think Heinlein will last, and Tolkein, and King. Who else?"

Rand and Solzhenitsyn. Between the two of them, they fingered the whole twentieth century.

A commentor in my e-mail once pointed out: "She warned us not to go there. He showed us why."

Not to ride my hobby-horse too hard, but Terry Pratchett will last, too. Anyone whose works can be read five or six times in short order just for the pleasure of watching a master at work deserves to last.

There's the deftness with which his characters, even minor ones, are realized; the vividness of his imagery; the splendid names and 'orrid puns; the sense of moral centerdness he projects... I can't think of an author I'd rather see a bright teen become addicted to.

Heck, he's just fun. So much so that people miss what an accomplished writer he is; he always uses the exactly right word, his sentences parse, his paragraphs cohere, his chapters break at logical places and his books are no longer than his plots - something that can't be said of, for instance, Dickens.

So: fun, technically accomplished, morally improving for the young... what's not for a literateur to disdain and the rest of us to enjoy?

Billy Beck is right.

If Ayn Rand can reach me (a person so wildly different from her) then her work can reach something good in most people (of many times and places). And Rand's writings did reach me.

There is a campaign (and has been for a long time) against Solzhenitsyn (calling him all sorts of things) there is also a campaign against even his style of writing.

Well I can not read Russian but Gulag (especially the third volume) is brilliant.

Even the fact that the work was written in different times and places and hidden works to its advantage - it means that chapter can stand alone.

Anyone who is unmoved by, for example, the chapter entitled "The Peasant Plague" (third volume - Gulag) has no soul (or, rather, has a soul that is vile).

Words do carry far beyond a certain time - if they are wise words.

For example I just watched someone carrying a sign in Fort Worth (one of the many protest rallies today that the mainstream media will ignore or playdown - instead concentrating on the rally of their false God Barack Obama).

The sign said the following:

"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates".

Tacitus.

And those words are as true today as when Tacitus wrote them.