A long-time friend etches the extraordinary and exhaustive life of the lion of American letters. Review by Shougat Dasgupta.
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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.
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Barnes & Nobel DePaul U, Chicago, IL 3/14/14
Biographer Lennon knew Mailer intimately as his friend, archivist, editor of his letters (still in progress) and partner in “On God,” a series of interviews about religion. Mailer had invited Lennon to be his biographer, and this richly detailed, revealing and very frank volume is the happy result. Its heft alone would please Mailer, who produced numerous shelf-benders.
January 2014.
This is an audio recording of J. Michael Lennon, author of Norman Mailer, at Politics & Prose Bookstore on January 12, 2014.
While reading the first chapter of “Norman Mailer, A Double Life,” the exhaustive (and exhausting) new biography of the great man by J. Michael Lennon, I discovered that during his formative years, from the age of nine through his admittance to Harvard at 16, Mailer lived in an apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, seven blocks from where I reside now
Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, James Parker and Rivka Galchen discuss what has become of the so-called literary bad boy.
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.