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.
Norman Mailer: A Double Life
Norman Mailer: A Double Life
The “glorious…sweeping, full-scale biography” of Norman Mailer, the famous novelist, journalist, and public figure: “There’s not a paragraph in this enormous book that doesn’t contain a nugget of something you…wish you had known” (The New York Times).
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 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, although he considered himself first and foremost a novelist, his greatest literary contribution may have been in journalism, where he used his novelistic gifts to explore the American psyche. He would return to certain subjects obsessively: John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, sex, technology, and the intricate relationship of fame and identity. Lennon captures Mailer in all his sharp complexities and shows us how he self-consciously invented and re-invented himself throughout his lifetime.
Michael Lennon knew Mailer for thirty-five years, and in this definitive biography, he 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. In Norman Mailer: A Double Life he “brings Mailer thoroughly alive in this great wallop of a book…and he captures the entirety of a man who embodied his era like no other” (The Washington Post).
J. Michael Lennon is Emeritus Vice President for Academic Affairs and Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania. In addition to being chair of the editorial board of The Mailer Review, he has written or edited several books about and with Mailer.