A Conservative Journey Through Literary America – Part 6: Mamet of Tarsus

In March 2008, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Mamet, author of “Glengary Glen Ross” and the man many consider America’s greatest living dramatist, wrote an essay for The Village Voice titled “Why I am No Longer A Brain Dead Liberal.”  This essay was a thunder clap in the arts community, leaving, as Dinesh D’Souza put it, the “left-leaning literary and cultural intelligentsia…in shock.”

The Saul-like conversion of Mamet has produced reams of commentary from both the left and the right, but it is the reaction of the left that is especially interesting.  Many in the liberal “intelligentsia” have greeted the news by openly wondering whether such a political shift will result in the loss of Mamet’s famous creative powers.  A “depressed” Michael Billington, for one, writing in The Guardian, is fearful of what Mamet’s conversion portends for his work because, “the precedents for a shift to the right on the part of creative artists are not exactly encouraging.” (more…)