J. Michael Lennon

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

Interview by John Wisniewski

Hour 1: J. Michael Lennon on the “Selected Letters of Norman Mailer” — Lennon says Mailer never tossed a single thing he ever wrote.

To celebrate the release of Starve the Vulture — the latest release in Akashic’s Kaylie Jones Books imprint — J. Michael Lennon spoke with Jason Carney about his inspirations, writing a memoir, and the differences between poetry and prose:

Explain how you came to do the biography. ¶ I was the understudy to write the biography of Mailer for a number of years. The original biographer was Robert F. Lucid, a professor at Penn and a friend of Mailer’s going back to the late Fifties. . . .

When J. Michael Lennon, Emeritus Vice President for Academic Affairs and Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, became Norman Mailer’s authorized biographer in 2006, he must have felt like a fighter preparing for the bout of his life. Yes, Lennon had known and worked with Mailer for decades. True, in addition to being chair of the editorial board of The Mailer Review, he had written or edited several books about and with Mailer. Sure, he was the past president of the Norman Mailer Society. But none of that diminished the task before him.

Dr. J. Michael Lennon is the man who helped Mailer put “The Spooky Art” together. Lennon, an author and professor at Wilkes University, also collaborated on Mailer’s last book, “On God: An Uncommon Conversation.” Since Mailer’s death in Nov. 2007, Lennon has been at work on the only authorized biography of Mailer’s life, a 300,000 word volume that will be published by Simon&Schuster. At the same time, he’s played a major role in establishing The Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, MA.

Joe Donahue interviews Mike on the Round Table.