J. Michael Lennon

Tom Wolfe, the dashing, white-suited journalist-novelist with a Ph.D. from Yale in American civilization and a vocabulary equal to that of William F. Buckley, satirical skills not dissimilar to those of Kurt Vonnegut, H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain (not to mention Shakespeare’s rival, Ben Jonson, the gimlet-eyed satirist), a Southerner whose tradition-battering stories in the […]

Mike discusses the Library of America’s new volumes on Norman Mailer’s works of the sixties.

Published this month by Library of America, Norman Mailer: The Sixties is a double dose of the trenchant writer who—in his fiction, his nonfiction, and in work that famously blurred the distinction between the two—threw himself unreservedly into the most tumultuous era in modern American history.

“No one in the literary world told us more about what was going on in the 1960s politically, socially, and sexually than Mailer.”

Writer Michael Lennon on the 95th anniversary of the birth of two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer and his Wikes University colleague Jeff Talarigo on his work, “in the Cemetery of the Orange Trees.”

With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – 500-plus years since Thomas More coined the term “Utopia”, denoting a too-good-to-be-true land, Chloë Houston considers the relevance, and importance, of Utopian thinking, and asks if we feel more at home in dystopia; prompted by a magisterial new biography by Jonathan Eig, J. Michael Lennon describes the transformation of […]