CREEMEDIA
If Norman Mailer is the heavyweight champion of American writing, an image he is fond of, then Dotson Rader must be rated as one of the top contenders for the title. Both stalk the same turf—the meaning of manhood, the link between sex and violence, an opposition to totalitarianism.
CREEMEDIA
When I Go Down To Be A Man An Interview With Dotson Rader
Tom McCarthy
BOOKS
by
If Norman Mailer is the heavyweight champion of American writing, an image he is fond of, then Dotson Rader must be rated as one of the top contenders for the title. Both stalk the same turf—the meaning of manhood, the link between sex and violence, an opposition to totalitarianism.
Born in Evanston, Illinois, during the Second World War, Rader came east to New York after graduating from military school. ("I think in a funny way it was the best time in my life because I belonged somewhere. I knew all the rules and by the time I was a junior I could give orders. All my latent fascism came out in full bloom.") After arriving in New York, Racier spent a few years hanging out on the West Side before entering Columbia University. At Columbia, he would discover the two interests that would dominate his life in the Sixties and Seventies—radical politics and writing.