A recent biography of the literary legend’s life largely ignores a fascinating part of Mailer’s life and career: his deep love for sports like baseball, bullfighting, and boxing.
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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.
On balance, Lennon does, however, reveal his subject’s double life, his honesty and deceitfulness, and his remarkably self-deluding but self-aware sensibility. If not the last word on Norman Mailer (what could be?), this book is likely to be the standard biography for this generation.
J. Michael Lennon’s “Norman Mailer: A Double Life” is a perceptive biography, one with a keen understanding of his work, his mind and his darkest impulses (notably, the stabbing of his second wife).
In 1948, a 25-year-old World War II veteran leaped into prominence with a number one best-selling novel about his combat experience in the Pacific, The Naked and the Dead. Over the next 60 years he wrote across a range of genres: biography and memoir, a column in the Village Voice, crime and sports narratives, poetry and short stories, several film scripts, and ten more novels of astounding variety.
J. Michael Lennon said he had two reactions when he was tabbed to write the authorized biography of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Norman Mailer. . .
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