The Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony is inviting you to the Norman Mailer Brooklyn Walking Book Tour hosted by our faculty member and Mailer’s authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon. Starting in the lobby of the St. George Residence and ending at the Norman Mailer home, Lennon will guide participants through a stimulating narrative of Norman Mailer and other writers experiences in Brooklyn Heights. Lennon will also discuss his authorized biography of Norman Mailer as well as Mailer’s Brooklyn based 1951 novel, Barbary Shore. This inspiring event is open to you and other Norman Mailer Center participants.
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Barbara’s Picks, Oct. 2013, Pt. 4: Helen Fielding Returns, Franklin and Fennelly Team Up, and Lennon Offers a Norman Mailer Biography.
Emeritus Vice President for Academic Affairs and Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, Lennon knew Norman Mailer and chairs the editorial board of the Mailer Review. So he is nicely primed to write this authorized biography, which draws on numerous interviews and unpublished letters. Given the richness of Mailer’s life as author and activist, public intellectual and philanderer, who consciously worked to shape his own identity, it’s hardly surprising that this work is nearly 1,000 pages long.
Just a reminder that May 1, 2013 is the deadline to apply for our summer fellowship and workshop program in Brooklyn Heights.
Via the Norman Mailer Society.
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.
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.
Norman Mailer’s God, not surprisingly, is a great artist, who created mankind and all the plants and other animals, and could reincarnate them according to his whim. But he was not all-powerful. Because there was the Devil—and the Devil had technology. And lately, the Devil seems to be winning……
The following interview is from The Mailer Review, 2008.
J. Michael Lennon, who is at work on an authorized biography of Norman Mailer, speaks with Sasha Weiss about Mailer’s letters and what they reveal about his ambitions, his relationships with other writers, and his enduring obsessions.