Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer (born January 31, 1923, Long Branch, New Jersey, U.S.—died November 10, 2007, New York, New York) was an American novelist and journalist best known for using a form of journalism—called New Journalism—that combines the imaginative subjectivity of literature with the more objective qualities of journalism. Both Mailer’s fiction and his nonfiction made a radical critique of the totalitarianism he believed inherent in the centralized power structure of 20th- and 21st-century America.

Mailer grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Harvard University in 1943 with a degree in aeronautical engineering. Drafted into the army in 1944, he served in the Pacific until 1946. While he was enrolled at the Sorbonne, in Paris, he wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948), hailed immediately as one of the finest American novels to come out of World War II.

Mailer’s success at age 25 aroused the expectation that he would develop from a war novelist into the leading literary figure of the postwar generation. But Mailer’s search for themes and forms to give meaningful expression to what he saw as the problems of his time committed him to exploratory works that had little general appeal. His second novel, Barbary Shore (1951), and The Deer Park (1955) were greeted with critical hostility and mixed reviews, respectively. His next important work was a long essay, The White Negro (1957), a sympathetic study of a marginal social type—the “hipster.”

In 1959, when Mailer was generally dismissed as a one-book author, he made a bid for attention with the book Advertisements for Myself, a collection of unfinished stories, parts of novels, essays, reviews, notebook entries, or ideas for fiction. The miscellany’s naked self-revelation won the admiration of a younger generation seeking alternative styles of life and art. Mailer’s subsequent novels, though not critical successes, were widely read as guides to life. An American Dream (1965) is about a man who murders his wife, and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) is about a young man on an Alaskan hunting trip.

A controversial figure whose egotism and belligerence often antagonized both critics and readers, Mailer did not command the same respect for his fiction that he received for his journalism, which conveyed actual events with the subjective richness and imaginative complexity of a novel. The Armies of the Night (1968), for example, was based on the Washington peace demonstrations of October 1967, during which Mailer was jailed and fined for an act of civil disobedience; it won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. A similar treatment was given the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions in Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968) and the Moon exploration in Of a Fire on the Moon (1970).

In 1969 Mailer ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City. Among his other works were his essay collections The Presidential Papers (1963) and Cannibals and Christians (1966); The Executioner’s Song (1979), a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel based on the life of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore; Ancient Evenings (1983), a novel set in ancient Egypt, the first volume of an uncompleted trilogy; Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984), a contemporary mystery thriller; and the enormous Harlot’s Ghost (1991), a novel focusing on the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1995 Mailer published Oswald’s Tale, an exhaustive nonfictional portrayal of U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy’s assassin. Mailer’s final two novels intertwined religion and historical figures: The Gospel According to the Son (1997) is a first-person “memoir” purportedly written by Jesus Christ, and The Castle in the Forest (2007), narrated by a devil, tells the story of Adolf Hitler’s boyhood.

In 2003 Mailer published two works of nonfiction: The Spooky Art, his reflections on writing, and Why Are We at War?, an essay questioning the Iraq War. On God (2007) records conversations about religion between Mailer and the scholar Michael Lennon.

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