This week, we’re taking a look at two new biographies of literary lions: Norman Mailer and Philip Roth.
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Last week, at a book party for J. Michael Lennon’s Norman Mailer: A Double Life, a 900-page authorized biography of the author, who died in 2007, a good deal of literate septuagenarians gathered at Mailer’s old home near Pineapple Street in Brooklyn. It was once on the market for $2.5 million but has remained in the Mailer family, just as the old patriarch would have wanted it.
Lennon’s central thesis is that Mailer, who died in 2007 at 84, long struggled with dual, and dueling, aspects of his personality: observer and activist, rebel and establishment figure, philanderer and family man, saint and psychopath, rationalist and transcendentalist.
As he left it. Photos by Donna Pedro Lennon.
JML and Colum McCann at the 92nd Street “Y” in NYC
It could be said that Norman Mailer was a man and a writer halfway between fame and infamy and yet with little in the way of middle ground. He was, in varying combinations, a world-class drinker, feuder, provocateur, self-mythologizer and anti-feminist. He was a war protester, a mayoral candidate, a co-founder of The Village Voice, as well as a wife stabber, a serial husband (of six wives), and a father (of nine). He was a boxer, an actor, a filmmaker, a poet and a playwright. He was also a journalist and a novelist of enormous and singular narrative inventiveness and thrust, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and one of the least boring and most tireless and tiresome public figures of the last half of the 20th century.
“Detailed and anecdotal without being gossipy (a yarn concerning a nicotine-addicted cat notwithstanding) and a must-read for students and admirers of Mailer’s work.”
Norman Kingsley Mailer, the author of more than 40 books, encompassing fiction, journalism, poetry, essays, and interview collections, was a prolific and brilliant writer, but he is nearly as well known for his charisma and instigative prodding, his mayoral candidacy and threatened presidential run, his love of boxing, his insatiable promiscuity, and his penchant for settling scores with a firm head-butt. These competing facets of his personality—at once his greatest asset and his hopeless Achilles heel—created fantastic and inspired friction in all aspects of his life.