Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007) was an American writer, filmmaker, and activist. His most well known works include The Executioner's Song, A Double Life, The Armies of the Night, An American Dream, and Why Are We in Vietnam? He was awarded the Pulitzer Price twice and the National Book Award.
- Norman Mailer: BritannicaNorman Mailer, in full Norman Kingsley Mailer, (born January 31, 1923, Long Branch, New Jersey, U.S.—died November 10, 2007, New York, New York), American novelist and journalist best known for using a form of journalism—called New Journalism—that combines the imaginative subjectivity of literature with the more objective qualities of journalism.
- A Brief History of Norman MailerPulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer’s career in our literature has been at once so brilliant, varied, controversial, public, and prolific and misunderstood.
Research & Reference
- Norman Mailer: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Norman Mailer. This page links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
- Norman Mailer: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom CenterHandwritten and typed manuscripts, galley proofs, screenplays, correspondence, research materials and notes, legal, business, and financial records, photographs, audio and video recordings, books, magazines, clippings, scrapbooks, electronic records, drawings, and awards document the life, work, and family of Norman Mailer from the early 1900s to 2005.
Streaming Media
- How To Come Alive With Norman Mailer: (A Cautionary Tale)HOW TO COME ALIVE WITH NORMAN MAILER explores the rollercoaster life of America’s most controversial and bestselling author of the 20th century, Norman Mailer. Propelled by his tremendous ego and contrarian spirit, Mailer’s ceaseless visibility in the public eye lasted 6 decades, during which he had 6 tumultuous marriages, 9 beloved children, 11 bestsellers, 3 arrests, and 2 Pulitzer Prizes. Prophet, hedonist, violent criminal, literary outlaw, and social provocateur, Mailer’s ideas about love, anger, fear, and courage cut to the core of human nature, are more relevant than ever today, and point to a prescription for waking ourselves up, shaking free of society’s expectations, and coming alive as a people.
Author's Works & Perspectives
The Executioner's Song
Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winning and unforgettable classic about convicted killer Gary Gilmore now in a brand-new edition. Arguably the greatest book from America's most heroically ambitious writer, The Executioner's Song follows the short, blighted life of Gary Gilmore who became famous after he robbed two men in 1976 and killed them in cold blood. After being tried and convicted, he immediately insisted on being executed for his crime. To do so, he fought a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death. And that fight for the right to die is what made him famous. Mailer tells not only Gilmore's story, but those of the men and women caught in the web of his life and drawn into his procession toward the firing squad. All with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscape and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. The Executioner's Song is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest source of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement-impossible to put down, impossible to forget.
The Armies of the Night
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Fifty years after the March on the Pentagon, Norman Mailer's seminal tour de force remains as urgent and incisive as ever. Winner of America's two highest literary awards, The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties' tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak. The time is October 21, 1967. The place is Washington, D.C. Depending on the paper you read, 20,000 to 200,000 protestors are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is a writer named Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day's events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mold of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth. "[Mailer's] genuine wit and bellicose charm, and his fervent and intense sense of legitimately caring, render The Armies of the Night an artful document, worthy to be judged as literature."--Time "Only a born novelist could have written a piece of history so intelligent, mischievous, penetrating and alive."--Alfred Kazin, The New York Times Book Review
Oswald's Tale
"In this book, Norman Mailer asks the essential question about the assassination of JFK: not "Who killed Kennedy?" but "Who was Oswald?" for only by answering the latter question can we hope to answer the first. In 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union and was sent to Minsk, where he lived for two and a half years and remained under constant KGB surveillance, on suspicion of being a CIA agent. In 1993, Norman Mailer spent six months in Russia, where he interviewed Oswald's former friends and sweethearts and obtained exclusive interviews with the KGB officers assigned to monitor Oswald's every move. He was also given exclusive access to the KGB files on Oswald, including transcripts of conversations overheard in the apartment that Lee shared with his Russian wife, Marina." "In Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery, Mailer reconstructs the life of this ambitious if doom-laden young man, giving a full account for the first time not only of the Minsk years, a hitherto uncharted period in Oswald's life, but also of Oswald's disastrous childhood, his years in the Marine Corps, and the events leading from his return to the United States in 1961 to his death in Dallas in 1963. The portrait of Oswald that emerges will greatly surprise readers who have thought of Oswald as a hapless loner: socially awkward, inarticulate, and an unremarkable loser."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Norman Mailer
From the biographer who knew Norman Mailer for decades comes the definitive, authorized portrait of the eminent novelist, journalist, and controversial public figure, based on extensive interviews and unpublished letters. Norman Mailer was one of the giants of American letters and one of the most celebrated public figures of his time. He was a novelist, journalist, biographer, and filmmaker; a provocateur and passionate observer of his times; and a husband, father, and serial philanderer. Perhaps nothing characterized Mailer more than his unbounded ambition. He wanted not merely to be the greatest writer of his generation, but a writer great enough to be compared to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. As Michael Lennon describes, he even had presidential ambitions, although he settled for running for mayor of New York City. He championed personal freedom and civil liberties, calling himself a "left conservative," and yet he was Enemy #1 of the Women's Movement. He was as pugnacious in real life as in print, engaging in famous feuds and fights. Although he considered himself first and foremost a novelist, his greatest literary contribution may have been in journalism, where he used his novelistic gifts in tandem with self-revelation to explore the American psyche. In that regard, the subtitle of his Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning Armies of the Night is telling: "History as a Novel, the Novel as History." He would return to certain subjects obsessively: John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, sex, technology, and the intricate relationship of fame and identity. Michael Lennon's definitive biography captures Mailer in all his sharp complexities and shows us how he self-consciously invented and reinvented himself throughout his lifetime. Michael Lennon knew Mailer for thirty-five years, and in writing this biography, he has had the cooperation of Mailer's late widow, Norris Church, his ex-wives, and all of his children, as well as his sister, Barbara. He also had access to Mailer's vast, unpublished correspondence and papers, and he interviewed dozens of people who knew Mailer. Norman Mailer: A Double Life gives us the man in full, a remarkable and unique figure in the context of his times.