J. Michael Lennon

What clearly distinguishes Ali: A Life from the score of biographies preceding it – including even the best of them: Thomas Hauser’s Muhammad Ali: His life and times (1992), David Remnick’s King of the World and the Rise of an American Hero (1998), and Gerald Early’s Muhammad Ali Reader (2013) – is the analysis of […]

October 1967 March on the Pentagon On October 21, 1967, an estimated 100,000 Vietnam War protesters rallied in Washington, DC. More than 35,000 demonstrators marched to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and many remained there overnight. More than 600 protesters, including author Norman Mailer, were arrested. The Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee hosted a panel discussion […]

The Times Literary Supplement (London) asked to post an excerpt from Norman Mailer’s last interview (September 2007) with yours truly to its website.

Two Westport residents with long ties to Provincetown, J. Michael Lennon and Donna Pedro Lennon, recently donated a rare copy of that Harper’s issue to the Provincetown Public Library to mark the town’s establishment of an annual public reading of “Moby-Dick.’’ Lennon, author of the acclaimed biography “Norman Mailer: A Double Life,” received the volume as a birthday gift from his brother about 30 years ago.

The Times Literary Supplement interviews Mike about literary giants and Robert Gottlieb. Listen below.

As an editor-in-chief at two American publishing houses, Simon and Schus­ter and Alfred A. Knopf, from the mid-1960s through the late 80s, and as the Editor of the New Yorker from 1982–97, Robert Gottlieb has coddled and hectored more important American writers (and some British) than anyone since Maxwell Perkins dealt with the distinctions and […]

Zero K, DeLillo’s sixteenth novel, is a probing examination of the ethics and techniques of cryonics – that is, the freezing of dead people (at present, cryopreservation can only take place after “legal death”).

Before anyone foresaw a time when a television celebrity could become president, Norman Mailer wrote in Esquire that John F. Kennedy was a mythical hero who could finally unite the business of politics with the business of stardom. His legendary 1960 reported essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermart,” about J.F.K. and the Democratic political convention, […]