Time was, everyone who wanted to wear the Artist Hero's wreath of flowers had to step into the ring. Norman Mailer cemented this routine by decamping from Harvard to combat in the South Pacific, returning to write the jaundiced great American war novel at the salty age of 24. He perpetuated this model by sussing out his literary rivals' weak spots in the cruel, clear-eyed essay "Evaluations: Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room" (a model for harsh literary criticism ever since). After Norman and his spiritual godfather Papa Hemingway, every American artist had to play, to some extent, the hard-hearted paterfamilias. Even the epicene Gore Vidal, who lived in a Roman villa, made his bones by getting into near-head-butting matches on TV with Mailer and William F. Buckley. By the '70s, female artists who wanted to share the glory had to strap on fatherly postures and grip brass knuckles. The filmmaker Lina Wertmüller, turning the Holocaust into a coarse porno cartoon; Patti Smith, donning the sweat-stained wifebeater of her forefathers; Erica Jong bracing her hips against the airplane's bathroom sink--all of them had to get their bad-ass ticket punched before they could... More >>>