DID YOU KNOW? In the fall of 2002 Mailer directed a one-night staged reading of Don Juan in Hell in Provincetown, MA. He played Don Juan, his wife Norris Church Mailer played his wife Dona Ana, Mike Lennon was her father, the Commodore, and Vidal played the Devil. He wore a jacket with a wine-red vest and stole the show. The play is the dream sequence from George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. Ten years earlier, Vidal also stole the show when he did it with Mailer (as the commodore), Susan Sontag and Gay Talese at Carnegie Hall.
DID YOU KNOW? Asked by Parade Magazine how he was seen by his high school classmates, he answered, “Quiet, studious and inconsequential.”
DID YOU KNOW? Mailer’s all-time favorite novels were John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., a three-part chronicle of the country from the late 1890s to the 1930s, and Leo Tolstoy’s 1877 novel, Anna Karenina, often called the greatest realistic novel ever written.
Jessamine Chan writes:
This fall sees three books about the exuberantly macho literary titan Norman Mailer. Clocking in at 928 pages, J. Michael Lennon’s authorized biography, Norman Mailer: A Double Life, utilizes insider access, interviews, and unpublished letters. Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays, edited by Philip Sipiora, is the first posthumous publication since Mailer’s death in 2007. This volume champions his role as a public intellectual and features a previously unpublished essay. (The third title is Melville House’s Vidal vs. Mailer.)
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