MAILER, Norman (Kingsley)

Nationality: American. Born: Long Branch, New Jersey, 31 January 1923. Education: Boys' High School, Brooklyn, New York, graduated 1939; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (associate editor, Harvard Advocate ), 1939-43, S.B. (cum laude) in aeronautical engineering 1943; the Sorbonne, Paris, 1947. Military Service: Served in the United States Army, 1944-46: Sergeant. Family: Married 1) Beatrice Silverman in 1944 (divorced 1951), one daughter; 2) Adele Morales in 1954 (divorced 1961), two daughters; 3) Lady Jeanne Campbell in 1962 (divorced 1963), one daughter; 4) Beverly Bentley in 1963 (divorced 1979), two sons; 5) Carol Stevens in 1980 (divorced 1980); 6) Norris Church in 1980, one son. Career: Co-founder, 1955, and columnist, 1956, Village Voice, New York; columnist ("Big Bite"), Esquire, New York, 1962-63, and Commentary, New York, 1962-63. Member of the Executive Board, 1968-73, and president, 1984-86, PEN American Center; Independent Candidate for Mayor of New York City, 1969. Lives in Brooklyn, New York. Awards: Story prize, 1941; American Academy grant, 1960; National Book award, for non-fiction, 1969; Pulitzer prize, for non-fiction, 1969, 1980; MacDowell medal, 1973; National Arts Club gold medal, 1976. D. Litt.: Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1969. Member: American Academy, 1985. Agent: Scott Meredith Literary Agency, 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022. Address: c/o Rembar, 19 West 44th Street, New York, New York 10036, U.S.A.

Publications

Novels

The Naked and the Dead. New York, Rinehart, 1948; London, Wingate, 1949; 50th anniversary edition, with a new introduction by the author, New York, Holt, 1998.

Barbary Shore. New York, Rinehart, 1951; London, Cape, 1952.

The Deer Park. New York, Putnam, 1955; London, Wingate, 1957.

An American Dream. New York, Dial Press, and London, Deutsch, 1965.

Why Are We in Vietnam? New York, Putnam, 1967; London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969.

A Transit to Narcissus: A Facsimile of the Original Typescript, edited by Howard Fertig. New York, Fertig, 1978.

Ancient Evenings. Boston, Little Brown, and London, Macmillan, 1983.

Tough Guys Don't Dance. New York, Random House, and London, Joseph, 1984.

Harlot's Ghost. New York, Random House, and London, Joseph, 1991.

The Gospel According to the Son. New York, Random House, 1997.

The Time of Our Time. New York, Random House, 1998.

Short Stories

New Short Novels 2, with others. New York, Ballantine, 1956.

Advertisements for Myself (includes essays and verse). New York, Putnam, 1959; London, Deutsch, 1961.

The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer. New York, Dell, 1967.

The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (not same as 1967 book). New York, Pinnacle, 1981; London, New English Library, 1982.

Plays

The Deer Park, adaptation of his own novel (produced New York, 1960; revised version, produced New York, 1967). New York, Dial Press, 1967; London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970.

A Fragment from Vietnam (as D.J., produced Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1967). Included in Existential Errands, 1972.

Maidstone: A Mystery (screenplay and essay). New York, New American Library, 1971.

Screenplays:

Wild 90, 1968; Beyond the Law, 1968; Maidstone, 1971; The Executioner's Song, 1982; Tough Guys Don't Dance, 1987.

Poetry

Deaths for the Ladies and Other Disasters. New York, Putnam, and London, Deutsch, 1962.

Other

The White Negro. San Francisco, City Lights, 1957.

The Presidential Papers. New York, Putnam, 1963; London, Deutsch, 1964. Cannibals and Christians. New York, Dial Press, 1966; London, Deutsch, 1967.

The Bullfight. New York, Macmillan, 1967. The Armies of the Night: The Novel as History, History as a Novel. New York, New American Library, and London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968. New York, New American Library, and London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968.

The Idol and the Octopus: Political Writings on the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. New York, Dell, 1968.

Of a Fire on the Moon. Boston, Little Brown, 1971; as A Fire on the Moon, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.

The Prisoner of Sex. Boston, Little Brown, and London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.

The Long Patrol: 25 Years of Writing from the Works of Norman Mailer, edited by Robert F. Lucid. Cleveland, World, 1971.

King of the Hill: On the Fight of the Century. New York, New American Library, 1971.

Existential Errands. Boston, Little Brown, 1972; included in The Essential Mailer, 1982.

St. George and the Godfather. New York, New American Library, 1972.

Marilyn: A Novel Biography. New York, Grosset and Dunlap, and London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1973.

The Faith of Graffiti, with Mervyn Kurlansky and John Naar. New York, Praeger 1974; as Watching My Name Go By, London, Mathews Miller Dunbar, 1975.

The Fight. Boston, Little Brown, 1975; London, Hart Davis MacGibbon, 1976.

Some Honorable Men: Political Conventions 1960-1972. Boston, Little Brown, 1976.

Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller, with Henry Miller. New York, Grove Press, 1976.

The Executioner's Song: A True Life Novel (on Gary Gilmore). Boston, Little Brown, and London, Hutchinson, 1979.

Of Women and Their Elegance, photographs by Milton H. Greene. New York, Simon and Schuster, and London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1980.

The Essential Mailer. London, New English Library, 1982.

Pieces and Pontifications (essays and interviews). Boston, Little Brown, 1982; London, New English Library, 1983.

Huckleberry Finn: Alive at 100. Montclair, New Jersey, Caliban Press, 1985.

Conversations with Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1988.

Pablo and Fernande: Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man. New York, Talese, 1994; published as Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography, New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.

Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery. New York, Random House, 1995.

Bibliography:

Norman Mailer: A Comprehensive Bibliography by Laura Adams, Metuchen, New Jersey, Scarecrow Press, 1974.

Critical Studies (selection):

Norman Mailer by Richard Foster, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1968; The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer by Barry H. Leeds, New York, New York University Press, 1969; Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, New York, Doubleday, 1970, London, Hart Davis, 1971; Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work edited by Robert F. Lucid, Boston, Little Brown, 1971; Norman Mailer by Richard Poirier, London, Collins, and New York, Viking Press, 1972; Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Leo Braudy, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1972; Down Mailer's Way by Robert Solotaroff, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1974; Norman Mailer: A Critical Study by Jean Radford, London, Macmillan, and New York, Barnes and Noble, 1975; Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer by Laura Adams, Athens, Ohio University Press, 1976; Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer by Stanley T. Gutman, Hanover, New Hampshire, University Press of New England, 1976; Norman Mailer by Philip Bufithis, New York, Ungar, 1978; Norman Mailer, Boston, Twayne, 1978, and Norman Mailer Revisited, New York, Twayne, 1992, both by Robert Merrill; Norman Mailer: The Radical as Hipster by Robert Ehrlich, Metuchen, New Jersey, Scarecrow Press, 1978; Norman Mailer's Novels by Sandy Cohen, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1979; Norman Mailer, Quick-Change Artist by Jennifer Bailey, London, Macmillan, 1979, New York, Barnes and Noble, 1980; Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Work of Norman Mailer by Robert J. Begiebing, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1980; An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer by Andrew M. Gordon, Rutherford, New Jersey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980; Mailer: A Biography by Hilary Mills, New York, Empire, 1982, London, New English Library, 1983; Mailer: His Life and Times by Peter Manso, New York, Simon and Schuster, and London, Viking, 1985; Mailer's America by Joseph Wenke, Hanover, New Hampshire, University Press of New England, 1987; Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer by Nigel Leigh, London, Macmillan, 1990; The Lives of Norman Mailer by Carl Rollyson, New York, Paragon House, 1991; Norman Mailer by Brian Morton, London, Arnold, 1991; Norman Mailer by Michael K. Glenday, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1995; The Last Party: Scenes from My Life with Norman Mailer by Adele Mailer, New York, Barricade Books, 1997; Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer by Norman Podhoretz, New York, Free Press, 1999.

Theatrical Activities:

Director: Films —Wild 90, 1968; Beyond the Law, 1968; Maidstone, 1971; Tough Guys Don't Dance, 1987. Actor: Films —his own films, and Ragtime, 1981.

A formal distinction between fiction and non-fiction, or between fiction and journalism, is not the most helpful way to approach either the direction or the value of Norman Mailer's work. Involving himself directly with public events as well as private concerns, reporting on activities as diverse as protest marches, prizefights, the moon landing, political conventions, and the life of the first man executed for murder in America in more than ten years, Mailer characteristically blurs, argues about, and plays with the conventional categories of fiction and non-fiction. The public events he reports become metaphors that clarify and demonstrate the issues he sees as significant, apocalyptic, or destructive about contemporary America. This combination of reporting with a personal fictive vision underlies some of Mailer's best and most searching prose, particularly The Armies of the Night or much of The Executioner's Song. Mailer began his career with a much more conventional idea of the difference between fiction and non-fiction, for, in the early novel The Deer Park, he had Sergius O'Shaugnessy, the young Air Force veteran trying to become a writer in the "new" Hollywood off-shoot of Desert D'Or, smugly certain that "a newspaperman is obsessed with finding the facts in order to tell a lie, and a novelist is a galley-slave to his imagination so he can look for the truth." More central to Mailer's later, more complicated, fiction and reporting is another statement from the same novel, the remark by Charles Eitel, the failed and (in the 1950s) politically suspect Hollywood writer and director, musing that "the artist was always divided between his desire for power in the world and his desire for power over his work." This emphasis on power, on the capacity to change both public and private circumstances, is never far from the center of Mailer's consciousness.

Rather than using any formal means of distinguishing one example of Mailer from another, the reader recognizes that a problem of selectivity, of what to include and what to exclude, is always visible. At times, Mailer seems to concentrate too repetitiously for too long on the relatively trivial or excessively personal, as in the rather stereotyped and remote satire of Hollywood in The Deer Park, all the legalisms of the last third or so of The Executioner's Song, or the defense of his own part in literary squabbles at the beginning of The Prisoner of Sex. Frequently, as he recognized himself in The Presidential Papers, he lacks a sense of proportion, is not sure about "how to handicap the odds."

Mailer's considerable literary ambition and the popular success of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, published when he was just twenty-five, placed his own development as a writer in a highly public focus. In spite of all the claims (many of them not from Mailer himself) about the "new" voice of his generation, his first three novels were somewhat literary and derivative. The Naked and the Dead, the novel about the platoon fighting both the Japanese and its own army on a Pacific island during World War II, shows considerable allegiance to the fiction of Hemingway and Dos Passos, as well as deference to the ethnic mix visible in Hollywood films made during the war. Barbary Shore, probably the best of the three novels, taking place in a Brooklyn rooming house after the war, using characters to debate all the various perspectives of radical politics in the 1930s, and ending with no resolution for the young alienated writer, is reminiscent of James T. Farrell. And The Deer Park, depicting the Hollywood world of drugs, pimps, mate-swapping, and politics, contains echoes of Fitzgerald and Nathanael West without the force of originality of either, all seen at a great distance, as if the chronicle of events could shock with nothing of the feelings rendered. Although interesting, often competent, and (particularly Barbary Shore ) full of excellent description, this fiction was more distinctive in aim than in achievement. Mailer's perspective, however, changed considerably in the middle and late 1950s, a change first visible in the 1957 essay The White Negro, a recognition of the clash of cultures and the violence endemic in American life. In that essay, as well as in the work that followed, Mailer began to associate imagination and creativity with the position of a sociological minority, a potentially healthy underside of American life. As he later, in The Presidential Papers, explained, he had not earlier acknowledged his own secret admiration for his violent characters in The Naked and the Dead, his own obsession with violence. From The White Negro on, although still disapproving strongly of the "inhuman" or abstract violence of technology, Mailer recognized the possibilities of creative change through violence, both in himself and in others. He also began to probe himself more consciously as a metaphor for the larger world he described.

Mailer regards his central characters, whether in the persona of himself in works like The Armies of the Night or Miami and the Siege of Chicago or through fictional personae in the novels An American Dream, Why Are We in Vietnam?, or Ancient Evenings, as "existential" heroes who constantly test the possible edges of human experience. Always in conflict, within themselves and with others, they dare, like Rojack walking around the parapet of the terrace high above New York, possible destruction in order to live all the possibilities of the self. Through action, they create the self, as Rojack does through murder, varieties of sexual experience, escape, criminality, and understanding. The self-creation involves a good deal of fear, as well as overcoming fear, for the hero must break away from the safe and familiar, acknowledging violence and destruction within himself. In Why Are We in Vietnam?, the novel of Texans on a bear hunt in Alaska, a metaphor that coalesces all those attitudes, tests, totems, and taboos that explain the American presence in Vietnam, the young voice, D.J., must create himself by recognizing and overcoming his own fear of the bear. The most frequent action in Mailer's work, which overcomes stasis and safety, is sex, the direct relationship with another being. In Ancient Evenings sexuality extends to procreation and lineage, speculations about new means of explaining human continuity and change. Each sexual encounter is a victory over isolation and abstraction, and, as Mailer explains in The Prisoner of Sex, he objects to masturbation and contraception because, in different ways, they prevent the fullest exploration of direct physical relationship. Mailer has always implicitly thought of sex in these terms, ending The Deer Park with a God-like voice intoning "think of Sex as Time, and time as the connection of new circuits." Yet the full development of self-creation through sexual experience, the sense of the orgasm as "the inescapable existential moment," detailed variously and explicitly, is in the work that follows The White Negro.

Mailer's "existentialism" is not simply private self-definition. In the first place, he frequently argues that existentialism is rootless unless one hypothesizes death as an "existential continuation of life," so that how one dies, how one faces destruction, matters. In addition, and emphasized much more frequently, Mailer's "existential" values are also social, the public consequences of definitions at the edges of experience. Social conflict is always visible, men defining themselves through the active public and social metaphors of parties, prize-fights, and wars. War (and Mailer frequently distinguishes "good" wars from "bad") has the possibility, seldom actually achieved, of changing the consciousness of a sufficient number of people to alter the whole society. Mailer began his definition of "existential politics" in 1960, with his essay called "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," on the nomination of John Kennedy for president at the convention in Los Angeles. He called Kennedy an "existential" leader because he displayed the capacity to commit himself to the "new" when "the end is unknown," a contrast to the safety and the public predictability of the Eisenhower years, although Mailer doubted that Kennedy had the "imagination" to create a wholly beneficial revolution. Yet, for Mailer, the potentiality for change and revolution, for self-creation on a public scale, is always there, a human impulse that if repressed or thwarted causes "cancer" on either the individual or social level. In these terms, Mailer, through subsequent "reports" on protests, political conventions, and public events, propounds both a vision and an analysis of contemporary American society.

In rather undiscerning popular terms, Mailer is often accused of a monstrous ego. Yet, the persona of "Norman Mailer," as it develops through many of the "journalistic" works, is highly complicated and self-critical, a metaphor for all the possibilities in contemporary man that the author can visualize and understand. As he explains in The Armies of the Night, he can accept the ambivalences of all the personae he adopts, "warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter." But the one persona he finds "insupportable" is that of "the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn," the one with which he began, which would deny his possibility to change and create himself. The personae of his later fiction are also complicated and carefully structured voices: the violent explosions, sensitivities, challenges, and social concerns of Rojack in An American Dream (still, to some extent, literary, as one critic, Richard Poirier, has explained, "both a throwback to Christopher Marlowe and … a figure out of Dashiell Hammett"); the scatology, sensitivity, fear, bravery, and self-recognition of D.J. in Why Are We in Vietnam? These voices, rhetorical and linguistic creations of a point of view, effectively express much of Mailer's complexity, although they lack something of the arch self-criticism (though not the humor) and the multiplicity of the persona of Norman Mailer who enriches The Armies of the Night and Of a Fire on the Moon, and whose implicit and more self-abnegating presence created The Executioner's Song. As personae, creative and capacious as they are, Rojack and D.J. can sound slightly more insistent, missing something of the "Norman Mailer" acknowledged incapacity to represent immediately all of America.

More recent examples of Mailer's fiction extend the personae into different forms. Ancient Evenings, an ambitious novel on which he worked for more than a decade, magnifies Mailer's scope as cultural historian. Set in Egypt over two centuries more than a thousand years before Christ, the novel locates the historical genesis and implications of many of Mailer's ideas concerning sexuality, lineage, violence, public power, society, and religion. Critically regarded as either the most probing or most pretentious of Mailer's fictions, Ancient Evenings manifests the enormous intellectual risks which the persona confronts. A much more limited and comic side to Mailer is visible in Tough Guys Don't Dance, his contemporary extension of Dashiell Hammett's world. The form, the multiple killings and suicides, as well as their discovery by the "macho" narrator who could have but, in fact, did not commit them, leaves room for many characteristic digressions. In addition to the central charting of the "tough guy" lineage, Mailer includes pages on topics such as the geological and historical topography of Provincetown, the implications of different uses of adjectives in the prose of Hemingway and Updike, the horrors for an addict of giving up smoking, and the inverse relationship between cancer and schizophrenia—all done with a sharp infusion of the comic that fits both the style and substance of Mailer's personae.

Both Harlot's Ghost and Oswald's Tale are massive books that mythologize the not-so-distant American past—CIA shenanigans in the case of the former, the Kennedy assassination in the case of the latter—and both met with mixed receptions. To some, the two volumes constituted a virtual poetry of espionage, Melville meets John le Carré; to others, they were yawning door-stoppers full of digressions, unbelievable dialogue, and bad grammar. One can hardly doubt the lengths to which Mailer went in his research, however: for Oswald's Tale, he and business partner Lawrence Schiller travelled to the former Soviet Union and studied old files kept on Oswald during Oswald's two-and-a-half-year stay in the country. For The Gospel According to the Son, the author tackled no less a story than that of Jesus, which he tells in first person: thus the protagonist confesses that during his famous verbal battle with Satan in the wilderness, he felt ineffective, and it seemed that "my words were like straw."

As a writer, Mailer is variously talented. He is a superb journalist, always aware of the differences between what an observer sees directly and what he creates. He is an excellent literary critic, as in his attack on Kate Millett and his defenses of Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence in The Prisoner of Sex. He can describe pictorially and movingly, as in Of a Fire on the Moon, or select brilliantly to chronicle American life, as in most of The Executioner's Song. More than any of these, he is consciously, seriously, humorously, and often convincingly the heir to a tradition of American visionaries, the writer who can create, in terms of the imagination, a new consciousness for his time and his country. In spite of his prolixity, his repetition, his occasional tendency to simplify polarities (his arguments against "technology" can become a rant that denies his own understanding of science), and his occasional insistence on the literal applications of his own metaphors (as in parts of The Prisoner of Sex ), Mailer has achieved something of his own revolutionary form in transforming the consciousness of others.

—James Gindin

Norman Mailer

Born: January 31, 1923
Long Branch, New Jersey
American author and director

Norman Mailer, American author, film producer, and director, wrote The Naked and the Dead, one of the most famous American novels about World War II (1939–45; a war in which Germany, Italy, and Japan fought against Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States). Only in his later political journalism did he reach that level of achievement again.

Early life and education

Norman Kingsley Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on January 31, 1923, the son of Isaac Barnett Mailer and Fanny Schneider Mailer. His father, an accountant, was originally from South Africa, having traveled to America by way of England. His mother's father was a rabbi (a leader of the Jewish religion). Mailer's family moved to Brooklyn, New York, when he was four. Mailer was an excellent student who loved to build model airplanes. At nine years old his mother encouraged him to write a story. Writing one chapter a day, the young Mailer completed a story that he called "An Invasion of Mars."

Mailer graduated from high school in 1939 and earned a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical (dealing with flight) engineering from Harvard University in Massachusetts. He won a college fiction contest, wrote for the Harvard Advocate, worked on two (unpublished) novels, and had a novella (longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel) published. Drafted into the army in 1944, he served in the Philippines in an infantry unit (a group of soldiers on foot) as both a clerk and a rifleman.

Writes popular war novel

In the army Mailer knew he was living the material for his third novel. From notes in letters to his wife, he composed a brilliant narrative around an army unit's taking of a Japanese-held Pacific island. Borrowing the natural writing style of writers such as John Dos Passos (1896–1970) and James Farrell (1904–1979), the use of symbols from Herman Melville (1819–1891), and the journalist's observations from Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), Mailer described (in language that offended many) the war and the inner conflicts of American fighting men. Mailer insisted that The Naked and the Dead (1948) was not written about a specific war but of "death and man's creative urge, fate, man's desire to conquer the elements." The work was a popular success and won him critical praise.

After attending the Sorbonne in Paris, France (part of the University of Paris), Mailer returned to the United States in the mid-1950s and helped found the New York newspaper the Village Voice. His next novel, Barbary Shore (1951), is set in a Brooklyn rooming house and contains complaints about the government of the United States. The Deer Park (1955), both the novel and the play Mailer adapted it from, focuses on two of Mailer's most memorable characters, Sergius O'Shaugnessy, former Air Force pilot, and Elena Esposito, broken-down dancer and actress. An American Dream (1965) shows Steve Rojack, trapped in an urban (city-based) nightmare of sex, murder, and despair, escaping with what remains of his soul to the jungles of Yucatán, Mexico. Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), one of Mailer's least popular works, takes its eighteen-year-old hero on an Alaskan hunting trip that ends with his initiation into manhood. These books voiced Mailer's view of the problems that lay beneath the surface of American life.

Changes to nonfiction

Mailer began a second career in the mid-1950s as an essayist and journalist. He became a national personality with the publication of Advertisements for Myself (1959), a collection of earlier writings that included bitter attacks, personal interviews, cultural essays, stories, works in progress, and confessions of how Mailer reached the depths of his own state and found a "new consciousness" (awareness).

Although the 1960s were a time of personal conflict and public rebellion for Mailer, he wrote many works during that period that helped establish him as a leading writer of nonfiction. The Presidential Papers (1963) presented criticism of American politics and society that introduced a new Mailer, a public historian of the years when John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) was president. This work, along with Cannibals and Christians (1966), attempted to establish him as "self-appointed master of the Now." The Prisoner of Sex (1971) contained a discussion of Mailer's various sexual relationships.

The peace march on Washington, D.C., in 1967 and the presidential conventions of 1968 gave Mailer some of his best material. Mailer, a skilled reporter, turned his notes into "non-fictional novels" using the style of New Journalism, in which real events are described with the addition of writing devices such as narrative, dialogue, and multiple points of view. The Washington experience became The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968), for which Mailer received a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. The political conventions shaped Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968). These works reflect Mailer's personality and controversial (causing dispute) opinions on historic events, creating sharp descriptions of the conflict between individual and collective power. Other works using New Journalism methods include Of a Fire on the Moon (1971), The Executioner's Song (1979), and Harlot's Ghost (1991).

In the late 1970s Mailer began receiving letters from a prisoner named Jack Henry Abbott, whom Mailer began to consider a promising writer. Mailer helped Abbott publish a book of letters, In the Belly of the Beast (1981), wrote the book's introduction, and spoke up on behalf of Abbott, helping him get released from prison in 1981. Two weeks later Abbott stabbed a man to death and went back to prison. Mailer was criticized for not recognizing Abbott's violent nature. (Abbott killed himself in prison in 2002.)

Later works

In 1987 Mailer directed his first film, Tough Guys Don't Dance. During the 1990s Mailer again turned his attention to biographical essays and novels. Portrait of Picasso As A Young Man (1995) and Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (1995) received poor reviews. Many critics felt that Mailer had used questionable new sources for subjects whose lives had already been examined. Among the theories Mailer presents is that violence and death are at the heart of Pablo Picasso's (1881–1973) Cubism (art based on geometry, or the study of points, lines, and surfaces) period.

Not one to avoid challenging subjects, Mailer chose to write a novel about Jesus Christ in 1997. As noted in the New York Times Book Review, Mailer wrote not merely of Jesus's life, but a modern-day Gospel, The Gospel According to the Son, using the voice of Jesus Himself—a choice avoided by all surviving ancient Gospels and by almost all modern novelists. Still, as in many of his other works, critics pointed to "rare powerful moments of invention" and gave Mailer credit for his knowledge of religious texts.

Mailer continued observing and commenting on major social and political issues throughout the 1990s, often interviewing people whose ideas opposed his, such as the conservative (preferring traditions and opposed to change) politician and newscaster Patrick Buchanan (1938–). In 2002 Mailer appeared as Ernest Hemingway in several performances of a dramatic reading called "Zelda, Scott, and Ernest," based on the friendship among Hemingway, the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), and Fitzgerald's wife Zelda. "It's as close as I'll ever get to Hemingway," Mailer told the Washington Post.

For More Information

Adams, Laura. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976.

Foster, Richard J. Norman Mailer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968.

Leeds, Barry H. The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer. New York: New York University Press, 1969.

Mailer, Adele. The Last Party: Scenes from My Life with Norman Mailer. New York: Barricade Books, 1997.

Rollyson, Carl E. The Lives of Norman Mailer: A Biography. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Norman Kingsley Mailer

Norman Kingsley Mailer (born 1923), American author, film producer and director, wrote one of the most noteworthy American novels about World War II. Only in his later political journalism did he reach that level of achievement again.

Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on Jan. 31, 1923. The family soon moved to Brooklyn. Mailer graduated from high school in 1939 and earned a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering from Harvard University. He won a college fiction contest, wrote for the Harvard Advocate, worked on two ambitious (unpublished) novels, and contributed a no-vella to an anthology. Drafted into the Army in 1944, he served in the Philippines in an infantry regiment, as both intelligence clerk and combat reconnaissance rifleman.

In the Army, Mailer knew he was living the material for his third novel. From notes in letters to his wife, he fashioned a brilliant narrative around an Army platoon's taking of a Japanese-held Pacific island. Borrowing naturalist techniques from John Dos Passos and James Farrell, a symbolist's stance from Herman Melville, and the instinctive journalist's observations from Ernest Hemingway, he described (in language considered objectionable in its day) the ironies of war and the inner conflicts of a cross section of American fighting men. Many readers saw only the realism in The Naked and the Dead (1948). Mailer insisted he was writing not only of a specific war but of "death and man's creative urge, fate, man's desire to conquer the elements…" The work was a popular success and won him critical acclaim.

After attending the Sorbonne in Paris under the G.I. Bill, Mailer returned to the United States in the mid-1950s, and founded, along with Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, the newspaper Village Voice.

In his next four novels, Mailer wrote from "intense political preoccupation and a voyage in political affairs which began with the Progressive Party and has ended in the cul-de-sac (at least so far as action is concerned) of being an anti-Stalinist Marxist who feels that war is probably inevitable." Barbary Shore (1951) is set in a Brooklyn rooming house. The Deer Park (1955), both the novel and the play Mailer adapted from it, takes place at a kind of Palm Springs of the imagination and focuses on two of Mailer's most memorable characters, Sergius O'Shaugnessy, former Air Force pilot, and Elena Esposito, broken-down dancer and actress. An American Dream (1965) shows Steve Rojack, trapped in an urban nightmare of sexual orgy, murder, and despair, escaping with what remains of his soul to the jungles of Yucatán. Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), the low ebb of Mailer's fiction, takes its 18-year-old hero on an Alaskan hunting expedition that ends with his initiation into manhood. These books voiced Mailer's view of the frustrations and compulsions that lay beneath the surface of American life, violently portrayed through existential heroes and at times written with flamboyant crudeness.

Mailer began a second career in the mid-1950s as essayist and journalist. He became a national personality with the publication of Advertisements for Myself (1959), a compendium of earlier writings that included bitter polemics, personal interviews, psychocultural essays, stories, works in progress, and unabashed confessions of how Mailer reached the depths of his own existential state and found a "new consciousness."

Although the sixties were a time of personal conflict and public rebellion for Mailer, he wrote many nonfiction works during that period that helped establish him as a preeminent writer in the genre. The Presidential Papers (1963) presented a critique of American politics and society that introduced a revitalized Mailer, the public historian of the John Kennedy years. This work along with Cannibals and Christians (1966) attempted to establish him as "self-appointed master of the Now." Issues pertaining to gender and sex were the basis of The Prisoner of Sex (1971), a treatise on Mailer's various sexual relationships in which he responds to Kate Millett's attack on his presumed sexism in her Sexual Politics (1970).

The peace march on Washington (1967) and the presidential conventions (1968) gave Mailer some of his most fruitful material. A seasoned reporter, he wove his copious notes into "non-fictional novels" using the style of New Journalism, in which factual events are related from the writer's perspective and incorporate prose devices such as narrative, dialogue, and multiple points of view. The Washington experience became The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968), for which he received a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. The political conventions shaped Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968). In addition to reportage, these works reflect Mailer's personality and controversial opinions on historic events, creating incisive portraits of the conflict between individual and collective power.

Other works using New Journalism techniques include Of a Fire on the Moon (1971) about man's first landing on the moon, The Executioner's Song (1979), an examination of the life and death of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, the first person executed (in 1977) in the United States under death-penalty legislation in more than a decade, and Harlot's Ghost (1991), in which Mailer treats factual events such as the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs from an overtly fictional perspective to imagine the inner workings of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

During the 1990s, the prolific and egocentric writer again turned his attention to biographical essays and novels. Portrait of Picasso As A Young Man (1995) and Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (1995) received poor critical reviews for his reliance on what many considered dubious new sources for subjects whose lives were already well chronicled. Still, David Gelernter in the National Review credited Mailer's heavy use of other authors in Picasso saying, "Picasso is a collage…The counterpoint that results is odd but effective," and that there were occasional flourishes of brilliant writing. Among the theories he presents is that violence and death are at the heart of Picasso's Cubism.

Not one to shy away from challenging subjects, Mailer chose to write a novel about Jesus Christ in 1997. As noted in the New York Times Book Review, Mailer wrote not merely a life of Jesus, but a contemporary apocryphal Gospel, The Gospel According to the Son, in the first-person voice of Jesus Himself—a choice avoided by all surviving ancient Gospels and by virtually all modern novelists. As in many of his other works, critics pointed to spotty narrative brilliance and "rare powerful moments of invention." However, in Gospel, Mailer also was credited for his knowledge of canonical texts, as well as his surprising—and to some, disappointing—adherence to tradition.

Mailer continued analyzing and commenting on major social and political issues throughout the 1990s, often interviewing his philosophical opposites, such as the staunch right-wing politican and newscaster Patrick Buchanan. The self-styled maverick and outspoken social and political arbiter of the times was widely regarded as the most prominent writer of his generation, and praised for the diversity and scope of his works.

Further Reading

The fullest critiques of Mailer are Richard J. Foster, Norman Mailer (1968), and Barry H. Leeds, The Structural Vision of Norman Mailer (1969); see also Norman Podhoretz, Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (1964); Ronald Berman, America in the Sixties: An Intellectual History (1968); Richard Gilman, The Confusion of Realms (1969); Laura Adams, Norman Mailer: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1974), Scarecrow; Laura Adams, editor, Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? (1974), Kennikat Press; Laura Adams, Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer (1976), Ohio University Press; Robert Alter, Motives for Fiction (1984), Harvard University Press; Martin Amis, The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), Jonathan Cape; and Chris Anderson, Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction (1987), Southern Illinois University Press. □

MAILER, NORMAN

MAILER, NORMAN (1923– ), U.S. novelist and essayist. Born in New Jersey, Mailer grew up in New York City and attended Harvard College. His two years with the U.S. Army in the Pacific theater during World War ii provided him with the background for his bestselling novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), whose violent dialogue and often lyric prose that evoked the fears and passions of men at war made him an overnight literary celebrity. Barbary Shore (1951) was a semi-surrealistic political novel set in a Brooklyn rooming house and The Deer Park (1955) a novel about Hollywood; in both of these books, which he himself called "existential," he revealed his growing fascination with the individual who intellectually, physically, or morally feels compelled to drive himself to extremes beyond the norms of human conduct in order to experience his own individuality. Mailer's increasing impatience with the novel as a medium for expressing his extraordinarily fertile if undisciplined mind and his ability to yoke together ideas of the most varied political, psychological, and philosophical nature led him in the 1950s to turn more and more to the essay, of which he published several collections: Advertisements for Myself (1959), The Presidential Papers (1963), and Cannibals and Christians (1966). Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) represented an experiment to deal in symbolic fictional terms with a burning political issue of the day. In 1968, Mailer wrote Armies in the Night, an eyewitness account of an anti-Vietnam demonstration held in front of the Pentagon in Washington whose melange of reportage, social and political speculation, and personal confession, written in a wildly exuberant prose, established his reputation by general critical consensus as the most brilliant virtuoso stylist in the United States. A second documentary, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), about the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions of 1968, was again a masterpiece of its kind.

Mailer's interest in radical politics took him from Socialism to anarchism to a generalized hostility toward the regimentation and mechanization of modern life that he labeled "radical conservatism." Always partial to publicity, he sought to popularize his ideas by running in the New York mayoralty campaign of 1969.

A Fire on the Moon (1970) was about the implications of the U.S. space program. In 1971, Mailer's The Prisoner of Sex was published, drawing the ire of the feminist movement. In 1980 Mailer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Executioner's Song, which offered a detailed account through an ensemble of characters of the life and execution of Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer. Ancient Evenings (1983), a novel, is set in the Egypt of the 13^th to the 12^th century b.c.e. His look at the cia, Harlot's Ghost, appeared in 1991, and his study of Lee Harvey Oswald, Oswald's Tale, was published in 1995. The Time of Our Time (1998) is a massive sampling of Mailer's work. His The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing (2003) is a gathering of his thoughts about writers, his own work, and the writing life.

Evaluations of Mailer often return to his fascination with violence and sexuality. Mailer's reading of violence in "The White Negro" (found in Advertisements for Myself) is a good example. Mailer argued that the Negro could survive his perilous American existence by accepting the desires of the body, living sensuously within the present moment. This creation of the self through action leads to the existential recognition of the self, in part, as body. The existentialist "must be able to feel oneself … to know one's desires, one's rages, one's anguish …" Jazz, for Mailer, the endowment of "orgasm," became one of the commanding achievements of the African-American, and spoke to, and of, "instantaneous existential states to which some whites could respond." The hipster's consecration of the present, his living his hatreds, his seeking the end of cultural and political repression through a life outside bourgeois mores, would be shaped in the future by the African-American's winning equality, a "potential superiority" that was feared, providing the background for domestic politics. Mailer's essay cemented into a mosaic the Holocaust, the concentration camp, African-American humiliation, endurance, and self-resurgence. Its affirmative violence coupled with sexuality provides a clue to some of Mailer's other work, most notably "The Time of Her Time" (found in Advertisements for Myself), An American Dream (1965), and possibly his life (he stabbed his second wife, Adele, in 1960).

His place in American literature is large, though his place in American-Jewish writing is problematic. (In her "Toward a New Yiddish" (Judaism, Summer 1970) Cynthia *Ozick believed that he would become a minor, if not forgotten writer because he did not write within the liturgical and moral richness of Jewish tradition.) On the one hand, his sharp indictments of the alliance among American politics, commercialism, and violence are insightful and enduring. His choice of characters and their novelistic development concentrate one version of American culture within the psychological and social existence of his subjects (whether fictional or actual; whether individuals or actual events). On the other hand, his influence on the American-Jewish novelist is, perhaps, that of craft. He is at ease in developing a realism in both its narrow and extreme senses – a focus on the empirical furniture of experience as well as a concentration on American myths and cultural directives informing the way we perceive, and act upon, the world.

add. bibliography:

H. Bloom (ed.), Norman Mailer (1986); M. Dearborn, Mailer: A Biography (1999); P. Manso (ed.), Mailer: His Life and Times (1985).

[Hillel Halkin /

Lewis Fried (2^nd ed.)]

MAILER, Norman

MAILER, Norman. American, b. 1923. Genres: Novels, Plays/Screenplays, Poetry, Social commentary, Documentaries/Reportage. Career: Member, Editional Board, Dissent mag., 1953-63; Columnist, Esquire mag., NYC, 1962-63; Co-Founding Ed., Village Voice newspaper, NYC, 1965. Publications: The Naked and the Dead, 1948; Barbary Shore, 1951; The Deer Park, 1955, play, 1967; Advertisements for Myself, 1959; The White Negro, 1959; Deaths for the Ladies and Other Disasters (poetry), 1962; The Presidential Papers, 1963; An American Dream, 1965; Cannibals and Christians, 1966; The Bullfight, 1967; Why Are We in Vietnam? (novel), 1967; Wild 90, (screenplay), 1967; Beyond the Law (screenplay), 1967; The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History, 1968 (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize); Maidstone (screenplay), 1968, as Maidstone: A Mystery, 1971; The Idol and the Octopus: Political Writings on the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 1968; Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968, 1969; Of a Fire on the Moon, 1970; The Prisoner of Sex, 1971; The Long Patrol: 25Years of Writing from the Works of Norman Mailer, 1971; St. George and the Godfather, 1972; Existential Errands, 1972; Marilyn: A Biography, 1973; The Fight, 1975; Some Honorable Men, 1976; Genius and Lust, 1976; A Transit to Narcissus, 1978; The Executioner's Song, 1979 (Pulitzer Prize); Of Women and Their Elegance, 1980; Pieces and Pontifications, 1982; Ancient Evenings, 1983; Tough Guys Don't Dance, 1984; Marilyn: The Classic, 1989; Harlot's Ghost, 1992; Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery, 1995; Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography, 1996; The Gospel According to the Son, 1997; The Time of Our Time, 1998. Address: c/o Random House Author's Mail, 1745 Broadway #B1, New York, NY 10019-4305, U.S.A.