Paul Theroux has described the literary world that existed in the two decades after World War II as "an age when writers were powerful, priest-like, remote and elusive. They were risk takers and romantics, lovably disreputable, seldom interviewed but often whispered about." Not so Norman Mailer, who was a key figure in the transition to writer as public figure. This post-war period was also an age of literary censorship, the Cold War and McCarthyism, advances in civil rights and social programs, and bitter opposition to the Vietnam War. Drawing on the recently acquired Norman Mailer archive, the exhibition will set the career of Norman Mailer in this cultural context and trace the central role he has played in our awareness and understanding of what Morris Dickstein calls the "shocks of history, politics, and contemporary life" that reshaped the last half of the twentieth century and continue to unsettle the twenty-first. The exhibition is made by possible by University Co-op.