Norman Mailer
2023 is Norman Mailer’s Centennial Year. Born January 31, 1923, in Long Branch, New Jersy, Mailer packed much eventful and tempestuous living before dying November 10, 2007, age 84. Raised in Brooklyn, Mailer was precociously bright, entering Harvard at 16 and graduating at 20. He published his first short story when he was 18. He was drafted into the US Army in 1944, despite being married (the first of many) and despite trying to get a deferral by arguing that he had a great literary work underway. It turned out that his combat experience in the Pacific was, in his words, “the worst experience of my life, and also the most important.” This scuffle with destiny is characteristic of Mailer: he exasperates with his talent, his obnoxiousness, and by often being right in his egotistic self-assessment.
His novel of combat, The Naked and the Dead (1948) remains one of the most significant novels of WWII. He was, fortunately and overwhelmingly, incapable of resting on his laurels. He published over a dozen novels, short stories, many books of essays, cultural commentaries, political journalism, plays and screenplays, poetry, and opinions in all formats and forums. He collected awards right and left: two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, a National Book Award for fiction, and a lifetime achievement National Book Award, among many others. He sought, enjoyed, and suffered a high profile in American letters. He engaged with almost all writers of 20th Century literature - friendships, rivalries, feuds, generosities, always talking and writing and getting involved, He extended influences that he felt, and he in turn shaped decades (to the present) of writers in almost all fields of endeavor.
Ancient Evenings
Ancient Evenings
Norman Mailer’s dazzlingly rich, deeply evocative novel of ancient Egypt breathes life into the figures of a lost era: the eighteenth-dynasty Pharaoh Rameses and his wife, Queen Nefertiti; Menenhetet, their creature, lover, and victim; and the gods and mortals that surround them in intimate and telepathic communion. Mailer’s reincarnated protagonist is carried through the exquisite gardens of the royal harem, along the majestic flow of the Nile, and into the terrifying clash of battle. An extraordinary work of inventiveness, Ancient Evenings lives on in the mind long after the last page has been turned.
Praise for Ancient Evenings
“Astounding, beautifully written . . . a leap of imagination that crosses three millennia to Pharaonic Egypt.”—USA Today
“Mailer makes a miraculous present out of age-deep memories, bringing to life the rhythms, the images, the sensuousness of a lost time.”—The New York Times
“Mailer’s Egypt is a haunting and magical place. . . . The reader wallows in the scope, depth, the sheer magnitude and—yes—the fertility of his imagination.”—The Washington Post Book World
“An enormous pyramid of a novel [reminiscent of] Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra.”—Los Angeles Herald Examiner