Norman Mailer was known for his toughness and temper, and his letters have plenty of that, but they also show his kindness and generosity with other writers.
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Selected Letters makes the Publisher’s Weekly picks for the week of December 8, 2014.
Norman Mailer entered Harvard in the fall of 1939, just as World War II began. His famous novel about part of that war, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948, and at age 25, like Lord Byron, he awoke to find himself famous. Sixty years later, looking back on the book’s immense success—it topped the New York Times Book Review’s bestseller list for 11 consecutive weeks and remained on that list for 62 more—he commented on the experience of sudden fame: “I knew I’d be a celebrity when I came back to America [he and his wife were living in Paris] and I felt very funny towards it, totally unprepared. . . . I’ve always seen myself as an observer. And now I knew, realized, that I was going to be an actor on the American stage, so to speak.”
NORMAN MAILER: A Double Life, by J. Michael Lennon. (Simon & Schuster, $20.) Lennon, who as Mailer’s authorized biographer had access to a trove of unpublished letters and papers, looks unflinchingly at the life of the towering American novelist and journalist who dissected the zeitgeist from the 1950s until his death in 2007. “There’s not a paragraph in this enormous book that doesn’t contain a nugget of something you should have known or wish you had known,” Graydon Carter wrote here.
Anyway, I can pay you the simplest compliment of all: I wince when I think of my writing having to be laid down next to yours. People will be able to make the obvious comparison. They’re not only going to realize the old boy is great; they’re going to come face to face with the fact that the middle-aged fellow isn’t so terrific.
Check out the entire list of this month’s best Biographies and Memoirs on Amazon.
DID YOU KNOW? When asked by Vanity Fair to name the qualities he most admired in women, Norman Mailer said “Beauty, mystery, wit, and the inner superiority to be above political correctness.”