James Wolcott mentions Mike’s interview with Donald K. Fried in The Daily Beast.
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How do you tell the story of one of the 20th century’s larger-than-life literary figures? Norman Mailer’s latest biographer J. Michael Lennon talks literary reputation, omens, women, and the never written.
Photo: Jeffrey Michelson
Mailer married six times and had nine children; there were innumerable affairs, parties and arguments. He published 44 books. He never stopped. After one of his children is born, he leaves the hospital and that night begins an affair with his sister-in-law.
Lee Siegel writes: “A new Norman Mailer biography shows that his life may have been his greatest work of art.”
Photo by: Frank Nastasi
Tune in to MSNBC’s The Cycle this Thursday, November 14 Monday, November 25 @ 3:00 EST to see a live interview with Mike.
The biographies of most writers go roughly like this: born, type, type, type, acclaim, type, type, type, marry, type, type, type, die.
Mailer is the exception. He never stinted on the typing, being a stranger to brevity – ‘I can’t get someone through a door,’ he once said, ‘without blowing a thousand words.’
But he also found plenty of time for activities that other authors can only imagine, such as sex and violence.
“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois,” Flaubert wrote, “so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Try telling that to Norman Mailer. He fought in the war and he fought in bars. He had six wives and stabbed one of them. He drank heavily, took drugs, slept with anyone he could and stood for New York mayor. He fell out with everyone who picked up a pen. Amid the mayhem he wrote great journalism, wildly uneven novels, bad poetry and made truly abysmal films. At his best he lived originally, challenging every constricting convention; at his worst he was simply violent.
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- Bar Toward Cape Cod
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- 3rd Floor Study
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- 3rd Floor Study
Photos by Donna Pedro Lennon.