Collection: The Time of Our Time

Overview

The Time of Our Time gathers decades of Norman Mailer's writing into a single, sweeping retrospective that traces the evolution of a singularly combative American voice. Mailer selected and sometimes revised fiction, reportage, essays, and personal reflections to create a composite portrait of his career and the cultural moments he chronicled, from the postwar years through the late twentieth century. The result reads less like a dry anthology and more like a keyed memoir: an author curating his own public life and literary preoccupations.
Mailer frames the collection as both archive and argument. Familiar passages from major novels and landmark pieces of reportage sit beside shorter fragments and newly presented material, producing a continuous, often jagged narrative of obsession with power, violence, eroticism, and national identity. The collection foregrounds the performative Mailer: the self that prowls his own pages as both witness and provocateur.

Contents and Structure

The selection brings together excerpts from the major phases of Mailer's career: early fiction that established his muscular, realist technique; midcareer experiments that blurred journalism and novelistic reporting; and later pieces that revisit public figures, trial culture, and American decline. Rather than offering a conventional chronology or critical apparatus, Mailer stitches the pieces into a sequence that emphasizes thematic correspondences and recurring characters, both real and imagined.
Editorially, passages are sometimes trimmed or reshaped to serve the larger narrative the author intends. That shaping makes the book less a reference volume than a narrative mosaic, where the gaps and transitions are as revealing as the texts themselves. The voice that emerges is unmistakably Mailer's, ornate, combative, often aphoristic, moving rapidly between detailed scene and sardonic generalization.

Themes and Tone

Violence and its cultural meanings run like a red thread through the compilation: personal, political, and theatrical forms of force recur as Mailer interrogates what drives individuals and nations. Masculinity, celebrity, and the ethics of power are persistent preoccupations; his writing frequently pits raw elemental drives against the constraints of modern institutions. Alongside polemic sits a keen interest in the public spectacle, war reporting, trials, and space exploration are treated as moments that reveal collective character.
Stylistically, the book highlights Mailer's restless hybridity. Journalism becomes fiction, fiction assumes the authority of reportage, and both modes are harnessed to moral and philosophical digressions. The tone alternates between swagger and introspection, a rhetorical strategy that both charms and provokes readers who relish confrontational intellect.

Reception and Critical Standing

Reaction to The Time of Our Time was predictably mixed, mirroring broader judgments about Mailer's career. Admirers praised the audacity of a writer willing to edit his life into a dramatic continuum, arguing that the collection offers an unparalleled doorway into his recurring obsessions and creative energy. Critics faulted the work for its self-mythologizing tendencies, its selective omissions, and occasional repetitiveness that underlines rather than resolves Mailer's contradictions.
Despite its controversies, the collection endures as a convenient, if partial, compendium of a major American author. It functions as both a primer for new readers and a revisitation for longtime followers, consolidating voices and episodes that shaped late twentieth-century literary and journalistic culture.

Why Read It

The Time of Our Time makes clear why Mailer remained a central, combustible figure in American letters: his prose is at once argumentative and intimate, prone to grand gestures yet attentive to specific moments. Readers seeking a sustained encounter with a writer who refused quiet renown will find a book that insists on being read as a prolonged engagement with strength, contradiction, and the turbulent history Mailer helped narrate.