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.
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“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.
Excerpt from a review of Ancient Evenings in the Springfield State Journal-Register, 4-17-83
In 1972, with twenty books behind him, Norman Mailer began to disengage from contemporary America, and started work on a novel that he hoped would “transcend the domination of actual events. The break was neither swift nor absolute, however. From 1972 to 1980 he published five books on four famous-infamous Americans: two on Marilyn Monroe, and one each on Muhammad Ali, Henry Miller and Gary Gilmore. Between spurts of work on these biographical books (which paid the bills), he labored deliberately on Ancient Evenings, a huge novel set in the Egypt of the 19th and 20th Dynasties (1290-1100 B.C.). Shell-shocked by the sixties, and depressed by the seventies, Mailer still understood that he would not be able to escape the temptation to speak directly to his time unless he chose a setting alien to Western culture, a setting so remote that historical memory could barely reach it, so far back in time as to stop it.
His original idea had been to write about Rome, Greece and Egypt, and he even made a trip to the Mediterranean to pick up some atmospherics. He never got past Egypt. Mailer was not impressed with present-day Egypt, but he immediately recognized what his extensive research confirmed: the Egypt of 3,000 years ago was swimming in religiosity, awash in faith. The citizens of Thebes and Memphis believed unreservedly in the Gods, and not as remote overseers, but as forces and presences in the smoke of the hearth and the mud of the Nile. Their nation was not a theocracy like Geneva or Plymouth Bay Colony; the priests were in liege to the pharaoh and he himself was a God. The reign of Ramses II, in which most of the action of Ancient Evenings takes place, is invested in magic and ceremony, blessings and curses. It was not a starched or stingy religion that these ancient Egyptians practiced, but a dynamic one, alternately graceful and fierce, always fervent. There was no separate secular life. The intrigues and projects of the Gods were manifested in the Egyptians’ prayers, fornications, marriages, and battles. Religion and sex, love and war: these are the four of the novel’s chief concerns.
An excerpt from a review of The Executioner’s Song in the Springfield State Journal-Register, November 1979
Routinely, at Gary Gilmore’s autopsy, the doctors peeled the skin back from his face as if it were a rubber mask, sawed open his skull, removed and weighed his brain. Then looking for tumors and motor system difficulties, they sliced it up as one would a meat loaf. They found nothing remarkable. Nor did they discover any abnormalities when examining the rest of his body, including his heart, or what was left of it.
In an attempt to delineate the character of Gilmore, Norman Mailer has written a 1,000-page “true life novel,” from his release from the U. S. Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois in April 1976 to the moment nine months later when his heart was pulverized by four steel-jacketed bullets in a deserted building at Utah State Prison.
Gilmore’s cold-blooded murders of a hotel operator and a gas station attendant, his capture, trial, conviction and sentencing were given full, if routine, coverage by the Utah media. But Gilmore did not receive national attention until he fired his court-appointed defenders, waived his appeal, and demanded that his death sentence be carried out on the appointed day. Presuming a hidden motive, the Utah Attorney General, and the media, expected an eleventh-hour turnaround by Gilmore, one that would no doubt be strengthened by his fierce insistence that he be executed. It didn’t happen. Gilmore was (excuse this) dead serious.
Not since the Rosenbergs’ execution in 1953 had a capital case received such attention. Gilmore’s face appeared on the cover of Newsweek, and on T-shirts (one of which, Gilmore said with gallows humor, might be worn to the execution and then auctioned off); the wire services systematically interviewed his friends, relatives, and lawyers; his tortured love affair and suicide pact with Nicole Baker made the evening news on TV. Even his selection for the condemned man’s last meal—a six-pack of Coors—commanded the front page of major metro newspapers. Through it all, Gilmore limited his contacts with the media, having signed an exclusive access contract with Lawrence Schiller, literary entrepreneur and Mailer’s collaborator. But his refusal to talk with the press only heightened his notoriety. Gary Gilmore became a household word in America before he died.
Kirkus Reviews names Norman Mailer: A Double Life one of this fall’s hottest biographies.
Norman Mailer: A Double Life named in The Atlantic Wire as an essential fall book.
To obtain a review copy of the biography, please contact Maureen Cole, senior publicist at Simon and Schuster. The name of the review venue must be provided. Thank you.
In this meticulous authorized biography, Lennon offers a comprehensive and unflinching look at the life of the controversial American novelist, journalist, and filmmaker who dissected the zeitgeist from the 1950s until his death in 2007. Lennon, a personal friend and the literary executor of Mailer’s estate, had access to a trove of unpublished letters and interviews. The result, written in a measured and sometimes dry style, stresses the extremes of ugliness and compassion that defined the author’s life and work. Made famous by the publication of The Naked and the Dead, Mailer had a manic energy for writing and a roving intellect, thrusting himself into the center of current events and exploring topics such as Vietnam War protests and the history of the C.I.A. The prolific Mailer was also a public celebrity who made frequent television appearances and even ran an unsuccessful campaign for mayor of New York City. Though Lennon doesn’t hide Mailer’s dark side—his belligerent narcissism, infidelities, public drunkenness, and violence—he tries to balance these flaws by emphasizing Mailer’s passion for challenging received ideas, his sense of humor, and his moral seriousness as an opponent of power. While it’s difficult not to find Mailer the man repugnant, Lennon’s almost clinical perspective shows the author’s restless innovation, which was indispensable for understanding the U.S. in the second half of the 20th century.