Mailer – Page 5 – J. Michael Lennon

John Buffalo Mailer, Mike Lennon, and John Hemingway (2010).

Why Mailer Matters

By webmaster

On April 4, 2013

In Mailer

Via the Norman Mailer Society.

Mike Is Now on Facebook

By webmaster

On April 3, 2013

In Mailer

Come and “like” him for additional content.

Norman Mailer, one of the most prolific, outspoken and accomplished writers of the second half of the 20th century, published over 40 books in virtually every literary genre, including some he invented. He was also a leading public intellectual who spoke out on a broad range of issues, from the dangers of plastic and the deadening effects of television to the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Iraq War.

A Brief History of Norman Mailer

By webmaster

On March 31, 2013

In Mailer

Among our major living writers, Norman Mailer is perhaps the most well-known, both in the United States and internationally. No career in our literature has been at once so brilliant, varied, controversial, public, prolific and misunderstood. Few American writers have had their careers on the anvil of public inspection for such a lengthy period; none (excepting Edgar Allan Poe) has been so regularly and simultaneously celebrated and reviled.

Mike Interviews NM about Castle

By webmaster

On March 13, 2013

In Mailer

The following interview is from The Mailer Review, 2008.

Catalog Description of Norman Mailer: A Double Life

By webmaster

On February 26, 2013

In Mailer

Norman Mailer was the most famous writer of his generation. People who never read a word that he wrote knew who he was, whether because of his fame as a novelist or journalist, or his notoriety because of his many marriages and affairs, his rivalries with other writers (Gore Vidal, especially), his appearances on television, his campaign for mayor of New York City, his prominence as the leading public intellectual of his time.

J. Michael Lennon was authorized by Mailer and the Mailer estate to write his biography, and as such, had access to family and friends, and to unpublished documents, notably Mailer’s letters (Lennon has edited the letters for publication by Random House, Mailer’s longtime publisher). He has interviewed more than 80 people for this biography, but most important of all, he knew Mailer for decades before the latter’s death in 2007.

Norman Mailer: A Double Life reflects Mailer’s dual identities: journalist and activist, devoted family man and notorious philanderer, intellectual and fighter, writer and public figure. Mailer himself said he had two sides “and the observer is paramount.” Readers of Lennon’s biography may find this self-assessment to be debatable.

Mailer was a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner (The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song). His first book, The Naked and the Dead, was an enormous best-seller, and Mailer would have ten more bestsellers, both fiction and non-fiction. He knew many of the most famous writers of his generation — Capote, Didion, Styron, James Jones, Lillian Hellman, Bellow, Vidal, Tom Wolfe — and quarreled with several of them. He was married six times, had nine children, and had numerous affairs. He stabbed his second wife, and later championed a convict writer (Jack Henry Abbot) who, on his release from prison, stabbed an innocent man to death. Mailer co-founded The Village Voice and wrote a column for that paper in the late 1950s. He ran for mayor of New York City in 1969 (with Jimmy Breslin as his running mate), a campaign that was as entertaining as it was quixotic. He was a prominent opponent of the War in Vietnam, and bete noire of the women’s movement. He was one of the leading voices of the New Journalism of the 1960s. He obsessed about the Kennedy assassination and the suicides of Marilyn Monroe and Ernest Hemingway, and wrote often about all three of these iconic figures. He was perhaps the most provocative chronicler of the second half of the twentieth century, both as journalist and novelist.

Lennon shows Mailer’s self-conscious effort to create an identity for himself, one that evolved constantly, based on an idiosyncratic amalgam of Marx, Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and dollops of whatever he gathered from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Lawrence and Stendhal, among others. Few people have ever tried on as many personas as Mailer — fighter, lover, philosopher, novelist, journalist, biographer politician, Jew, American. Whether you admired him or loathed him, he was remarkable and unique. His was an astonishing life.