Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties

No one would love more, other than the subjects themselves, the level of import Shultz lavishes on his premise that William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008), a conservative author and commentator who founded the conservative magazine National Review, and Norman Mailer (1923–2007), a successful novelist, essayist, playwright, and cultural critic had great societal impact through the public discourse of their friendship. Despite the concept getting little traction here, Schultz (history, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago) engages the reader with his writing style. Unlike the author's first title, Tri-Faith America, with its broad approach—the faith-based analysis of a generation's impact—this latest work attempts to extrapolate the changing social norms of the 1960s through the lives of two accomplished yet different men. Schultz's examination of the times, both public and private, that fostered Buckley and Mailer's complex friendship illuminates each individual's impact on the era, but unfortunately less is revealed about how they, as a collective, shaped anything except their own inflated self-regard. It's much easier to see their relationship having had marginal effect on the decade in question; modernity has relegated their tiffs to lesser annals. Can't they stay there?