The personification of cool, however, continued to be the hipster. Norman Mailer, a close reader of Anatole Broyard, was clearly influenced by Broyard’s essays on the subject, but made the connection to black culture even more explicit in “The White Negro.”
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Bogging down in J. Michael Lennon’s biography of Norman Mailer, A Double Life, just about the point where I’d have expected. The Naked and the Dead is a bestseller and Mailer’s trying to cope with his newly acquired celebrity—mostly by sleeping with as many women as he can find time to—hanging out in Hollywood, looking to sell the screen rights and struggling to come up with an idea for his next novel.
Which puts him in the same position he’ll be in for the rest of his life. A celebrity writer whose fame and reputation rest on his being a great novelist but who has no more great novels in him to write.
Lennon captures Mailer’s enormous drive to master his craft, to experiment with form and genre, to build a reputation, and to contend with the large issues of his country and culture for six decades. This biography is not only indispensable for students of Mailer, but also for anyone interested in taking the pulse of the United States through those decades. More and more, Mailer put himself on the stages of literary and political history, shaping both through his participation and shaping our collective memory through his influential, if sometimes abrasive, representations.
Sunday, April 27, 3:00 – 5:00 pm
Westport author, Dawn Tripp, and Partners Village Store present the Writer’s Series. The event will be a dynamic, open and interactive discussion with the author about the writing process, the work of creating a story, and publishing. Books will be available for signing at the conclusion of the talk.
Norman Mailer: A Double Life by J. Michael Lennon, Mailer archivist and authorized biographer.
After he finished reading an earlier biography of himself, Norman Mailer told me, with a mixture of rue and triumph, “He missed the twinkle.” His new biographer, J. Michael Lennon, does not miss the twinkle or much else about the writer who swaggered across a half century of American life, writing novels, plays, poems, essays, journalism, even some theological speculation along with directing movies. Near the end Mailer stood, propped on two canes like a wounded mercenary who had fought behind the lines all his life, a writer/celebrity as drained by the daring and scope of his ambition to find the Northwest Passage to the origins of American mores as Theodore Roosevelt was when, scarred and fevered, he emerged from his post-presidential search for the source of the Amazon.
A long-time friend etches the extraordinary and exhaustive life of the lion of American letters. Review by Shougat Dasgupta.
When J. Michael Lennon, Emeritus Vice President for Academic Affairs and Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, became Norman Mailer’s authorized biographer in 2006, he must have felt like a fighter preparing for the bout of his life. Yes, Lennon had known and worked with Mailer for decades. True, in addition to being chair of the editorial board of The Mailer Review, he had written or edited several books about and with Mailer. Sure, he was the past president of the Norman Mailer Society. But none of that diminished the task before him.
Preorder your copy today from Amazon.
Biographer Lennon knew Mailer intimately as his friend, archivist, editor of his letters (still in progress) and partner in “On God,” a series of interviews about religion. Mailer had invited Lennon to be his biographer, and this richly detailed, revealing and very frank volume is the happy result. Its heft alone would please Mailer, who produced numerous shelf-benders.
While reading the first chapter of “Norman Mailer, A Double Life,” the exhaustive (and exhausting) new biography of the great man by J. Michael Lennon, I discovered that during his formative years, from the age of nine through his admittance to Harvard at 16, Mailer lived in an apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, seven blocks from where I reside now