Because Mailer often addressed various modes of violence in his fiction and nonfiction, over time many readers have mistakenly believed that Mailer endorsed all forms violence. Yet Mailer was careful to parse the nuances of different forms of violence, and rarely, if ever, does violence go wholly unquestioned in his work. This chapter covers Mailer’s distinctive criticisms of violence, addressing his notions of “creative” violence versus purely destructive violence; his sharp criticisms of the violences enacted in Vietnam; his meditations on structural violence, and the connections he draws between violence, courage, and manhood.

In 1960, Mailer published his famous essay on JFK, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” a defining and significant contribution to New Journalism. The essay frames JFK as a kind of existential hero and a beacon of hope for America’s future, and is representative of the lasting influence Kennedy had on Mailer’s political views and conceptions of America, the American Dream, and American masculinity. Much of The Presidential Papers, a miscellany of writings published in 1964, is also devoted to the Kennedys, and the figure of JFK haunts more than one of Mailer’s later works as well.

In a number of works, ranging from “The White Negro” to An American Dream to Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer controversially confronts the issue of race. As this chapter explains, he does so in ways that reflect the racist limitations of perspective arising from Mailer’s own position of privilege, and which also capture significant elements of the racial climate of the time.