The Greatest Living American Writer on Salman Rushdie
In the late 1990s, author Neal Pollack developed an alter-ego character, "The Greatest Living American Writer," for the McSweeneys website, to satirize a generation of pretentious authors, particularly Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, as well as macho literary journalists. That character formed the basis of Pollack's first book, the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. The GLAW has since appeared in numerous other publications, left- and right-wing and completely apolitical, surfacing and de-surfacing as the times demand. Now he's back in The Spectator World, until we get tired of him. I have been the Greatest Living American Writer across eight decades of world literature and have seen many shocking acts of violence.
