Drawing on fifty years of teaching and study, this work by Donald L. Kaufmann examines the legacy of the consummate American writer, Norman Mailer (1923-2007). Kaufmann compares Mailer's achievement to the Literary Naturalists-Crane, Norris, London, and Dreiser. He contrasts Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald and others, before surveying Mailer's relationship to Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Existentialism, and Postmodern.