Norman Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, and essayist, recognized as a pioneer of creative nonfiction and the New Journalism movement. His writing often delved into the raw realities of American life, exploring themes of violence, power, and the male psyche. Mailer's distinctive style is characterized by its visceral immediacy, compelling characters, and incisive social and political commentary. He masterfully navigated the boundaries between fiction and fact, pushing the conventions of literary expression.
Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead is not just a monumental war novel but also a devastating antiwar novel, exposing the primal nature of power through the interplay of a platoon of soldiers on an impossible and ultimately pointless mission on an obscure island in the Pacific during World War II. Written just after the war ended, in the early days of the emerging Cold War, the novel daringly engages with the authoritarian impulses in the American character
Exploring the aftermath of the 1968 upheaval, this collection showcases the writings of America's most influential literary provocateur, capturing the essence of a turbulent decade. Through powerful prose and thought-provoking insights, the author reflects on societal changes, cultural shifts, and the enduring impact of that era. The book serves as both a historical account and a commentary on the complexities of modern America, revealing how the echoes of the past continue to resonate today.
"This volume contains thirty-six essays published by Norman Mailer from November 1960 to September 1969, along with the preface to his 1963 collection The Presidential Papers and two prefaces he wrote for paperback editions of that book"--Note, page 471.
No writer plunged more wholeheartedly into the chaotic energies of the 1960s than Norman Mailer, as he fearlessly revolutionized literary norms and genres to capture the political, social, and sexual explosions of an unsettled era. Here, for the first time in one volume, are his unforgettable books of the 1960s: two disruptive and visionary novels, and two radically innovative journalistic masterpieces. War hero, television star, existential hipster, seducer, murderer: such is the protagonist of An American Dream, Mailer's hallucinatory voyage through the dark night of an America awash in money, sex, and violence. In Why Are We in Vietnam? a motor-mouthed 18-year-old Texan on the eve of military service recounts with manic and obscene exuberance a grizzly bear hunt in Alaska that exposes the macho roots of the war. The acclaimed "non-fiction novel" The Armies of the Night (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award) and its follow-up Miami and the Siege of Chicago are on-the-scene, in-the-scene accounts of an antiwar march on the Pentagon and the party conventions of 1968, as Mailer casts himself as a player in the drama he reports, bringing a sharp and merciless eye on the decade's political upheavals.
“It is impossible to walk away from this novel without being sharply reminded of the fact that Norman Mailer is a writer of extraordinary ability.”—Chicago Tribune Featuring a new foreword by Mailer scholar Maggie McKinley Published nearly twenty years after Norman Mailer’s fiction debut, The Naked and the Dead, this acclaimed novel further solidified the author’s stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Ranald “D. J.” Jethroe, Texas’s most precocious teenager, recounts a brutal hunting trip he took to Alaska—in a story of fathers and sons, myth and masculinity, character and corruption. Both entertaining and profound, Why Are We in Vietnam? is an exceptional, timeless work awaiting discovery by a new generation of readers. Praise for Why Are We in Vietnam? “A book of great integrity. All the old qualities are here: Mailer’s remarkable feeling for the sensory event, the detail, ‘the way it was,’ his power and energy.”—The New York Review of Books “A tour de force, a treatise on human nature.”—The Dallas Morning News “A brilliant piece of writing.”—Newsweek “Original, courageous, and provocative.”—The New York Times
"Wounded during World War II, Mike Lovett is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. But when Lovett rents a room in Brooklyn, he finds that his housemates have secrets of their own: one betrays a husband no one ever sees; another may have been a Communist executioner"--Back cover
The story of two interlacing love affairs. Sergius O'Shaughnessy is a young ex-Air Force pilot whose good looks and air of indifference launch him into the orbit of the radiant actress Lulu Meyers. Charles Eitel is a brilliant director wounded by accusations of communism--and whose liaison with the volatile Elena Esposito may supply the coup de grace to his career
"Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 40 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific--or more exposed--than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence. Now the best of these are published here in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and, it seems, several lifetimes. Compiled by Mailer's authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and organized by decade, Selected Letters of Norman Mailer features the most fascinating of Mailer's missives from 1940 to 2007--letters to his family and friends, to fans and fellow writers, including Truman Capote and James Baldwin, to political figures from Henry Kissinger to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and to such cultural icons as John Lennon, Marlon Brando, and even Monica Lewinsky. Together these letters form a stunning autobiographical portrait of one of the most original, provocative, and outspoken public intellectuals of the twentieth century."--Back cover
The first posthumous publication from this outsize literary icon, "Mind of an Outlaw" collects Mailer's most important and representative work in the form that many rank as his most electrifying
Bert Stern's "Last Sitting" photographs of Marilyn Monroe enter a dialogue with Norman Mailer's rigorous biography of the actress in this virtuoso publication. The fusion of image and text makes for an intimate portrait of an infamously enigmatic woman; a celebrity who shone even in tragedy. In this bold synthesis of literary classic and...