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Tag: BostonGlobe

The Two Sides of Mailer

J. Michael Lennon, a mild-mannered retired English professor, will forever be linked to the combative Norman Mailer. His 900-page biography, “Norman Mailer: A Double Life” (Simon & Schuster), was published this past fall to wide acclaim, and Lennon is now in the throes of editing 50,000 of Mailer’s letters for a book to be published in the fall of 2014. It was a letter, after all, that first joined Lennon’s life to Mailer’s.

Boston Globe Reviews the Bio

Lennon’s central thesis is that Mailer, who died in 2007 at 84, long struggled with dual, and dueling, aspects of his personality: observer and activist, rebel and establishment figure, philanderer and family man, saint and psychopath, rationalist and transcendentalist.

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