The advent of Norman Mailer into the postwar American literary domain brought a new hue to the intellectual and political outlook. He was, beyond doubt, a controversial writer and thinker. For all his inhibitions and personal excesses, he was the one who wrote to make `revolution in the consciousness of times.' Mailer's obsession was human dignity and individual will to lead life on the basis of freedom. His was a distinct vision which did foresee the threats of totalitarianism. His mission was individual personal salvation. Mailer extensively and effectively used the concept of existentialism in almost all his literary endeavors. This paper is an attempt to throw light on Mailer's treatment of the existential philosophy. It also endeavors to highlight the humanistic concerns in Mailer's selected writings.

By the time Norman Mailer began his promising literary career, the situation in America—political, social, cultural, and above all human— was volatile. Contemporary writers then had a stupendous challenge of representing the age and its facts. The common core of the diverse works was not merely artistic or aesthetic excellence but to define or rather redefine the age-old questions regarding the purpose of man's life and his nature and destiny. Those are the issues of human condition even in an age of mass technology, an age that has discovered the secret formula for man's destruction. The predominant theme of the twentieth century American writings was search—a search for permanence in a world of instability, a search for absolutes in a world whose ultimate reality is relativity.

There was bitter criticism leveled against writers like Mark Twain, Howells, and Henry James that their works added little to understanding man's dilemma in the modern world. But the postwar writers adopted a dual concept. They accepted the notion of tragedy and meaning of man's life and the world which he lives in. Novelists like Hemmingway, Faulkner, and Norman Mailer took up the mission of social documentation through their novels. Mailer, who was also a journalist, is conscious of the differences between what an observer sees and perceives directly and what he creates. He is deliberately, seriously, and often convincingly an heir to the tradition of American visionaries. He has endeavored to reanimate, for modern man, a belief in the struggle between God and Devil. He resists the totalitarian organization of human psyche, which he identifies with cancer destabilizing the contemporary society.

American Literature Journal, Postwar American Literary, Social Documentation, Totalitarian Organization, Mass Technology, Contemporary Societies, Social Taboos, Political Radicalism, Technocratic Society, Contemporary World, Second World War.