David Mamet: The Mystery of an Icon

Paper Summary:

This paper deals with David Mamet as an icon of American literature. Mamet?s own life, interviews, and especially his play "The Cryptogram", are used to illustrate the paradoxical nature of his work: creative genius on one side, personal anguish on the other. How Mamet?s own past expresses itself in his work is a major concern.

From the Paper:

"A paranoid recluse, yet a brilliant social critic, David Mamet has become an icon of modern American literature. He has perplexed readers and audiences worldwide with his quintessential blend of vulgarity, conflict, and keen intellectualism. But if his writing presents a paradox, it is only because his thoughts and the life that has formed them are a paradox. Refusing to grant reporters and interviewers direct access to the details of his abusive and dysfunctional childhood home, elucidating only on the rarest of occasions (Interview 52), his writing is a fountain of conscious and unconscious expression, golden to the psychoanalyst, and at the very least fascinating to the literary eye. Mamet's many ?disguises,? which changed frequently throughout the 1970s and 1980s to reflect the attitudes in his writing (Lahr 70), are just one example of his desire to cloak his inner self from the outside world. The language, themes, and characters in his interviews, autobiographical pieces, and his play, The Cryptogram, make it clear that to uncover the mystery of David Mamet is to make it infinitely more complex. David Mamet is an essential paradox of the conflict of his past and the clarity of his creative vision."

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