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 He won a college fiction contest, wrote for the Harvard Advocate, worked on two ambitious (unpublished) novels, and contributed a no-vella to an anthology.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 (1923– ),born in New Jersey, reared in Brooklyn, began writing fiction before graduation from Harvard (1943). After serving with the army in the Pacific he wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948), a realistic and naturalistic novel of the fates of 13 men in an infantry platoon who survive the invasion of a Japanese‐held island. Both a popular and a critical success, it was followed by two novels in which he turned from naturalistic to existential and allegorical views and which were far less well received: Barbary Shore (1951), a symbolic treatment of the conflict between leftist and rightist political forces in the U.S., and The Deer Park (1955, dramatized 1967), a bitter view of Hollywood as representative of the entire nation, seen through the stories of three men, a film director whose desire to create honest pictures is threatened by the rightist House Committee on Un‐American Activities, an air force veteran who can find no significant place in the postwar society, and a pimp who is both ambitious and philosophic in the style of a modern Faust. The White Negro (1957) is really part of the Beat Movement, calling upon contemporaries to resist media‐driven culture. Mailer next published Advertisements for Myself (1959), in which he not only collected fiction but began his authorship of distinguished nonfictive works analyzing aspects of his times, in this one concentrating on himself as author in the postwar setting. Mailer returned to fiction with An American Dream (1965), a lurid depiction of a disintegrating marriage and a corrupt society, and the coruscating and symbolic Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), in which an obsessed disc jockey in Texas tells of an Alaskan bear hunt made in his youth with his father and a friend, whose quest to prove masculinity and relish the kill is a commentary on America's foray into Vietnam. The investigation of American character in that novel also animated his succeeding nonfiction: The Armies of the Night (1968, Pulitzer Prize), treating his experiences and reflections during a pacifist march on the Pentagon (1967); Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), his view of the current Republican and Democratic presidential conventions; Of a Fire on the Moon (1970), analyzing the lunar landings; and The Executioner's Song (1979, Pulitzer Prize), a very lengthy so‐called true life novel about Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer, the first person to be executed (1977) in the U.S. for more than a decade. Other nonfictional works are Cannibals and Christians (1966), mainly essays; The Prisoner of Sex (1971), a reply to a proponent of women's liberation; Marilyn (1973), a speculative biography of the film star Marilyn Monroe; and Of Women and Their Elegance (1980), an “imaginary memoir” of Marilyn Monroe. Ancient Evenings (1983) is a massive novel set in Egypt during the years 1320–1121 BC, which has for a protagonist one Menenhetet, who in the course of the novel is reborn three times and rises from a peasant childhood to become an adviser to pharaohs; Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984) is a lively mystery novel; and Harlot's Ghost (1991), another lengthy novel, is about two generations of CIA operatives. In Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (1995), Mailer returns to the true‐life novel technique in an attempt to discover Lee Harvey Oswald's personality, examining especially his two years in Russia by using interviews with Russian friends and family and, most especially, KGB files containing transcripts from the Oswalds' bugged apartment in Minsk. No Russian, including the widow, Marina, believes Oswald capable of acting alone in assassinating JFK. His most recent novels are The Gospel According to the Son (1997) and The Time of Our Time (1998). Mailer collected his poems in Death for the Ladies and Other Di‐sasters (1962) and his stories in Short Fiction (1967). The Spooky Art (2003) collects essays, interviews, and other texts on the craft of writing.

Norman Mailer (Norman Kingsley Mailer), 1923–2007, American writer, b. Long Branch, N.J., grad. Harvard, 1943. He grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., served in the army during World War II, and at the age of 25 published The Naked and the Dead (1948). A partially autobiographical bestseller, it was one of the most significant novels to emerge from the war and it catapulted Mailer to literary fame. His next two novels, Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), were generally considered failures. More successful was An American Dream (1966), an exploration of sex, violence, and death in America—themes that Mailer was to revisit throughout his career—through the experiences of his semiautobiographical protagonist.

Mailer, who tended to view himself and his fictional protagonists in a heroic mode, was very much a public figure—pugnacious, self-promoting, and articulate, with a distinctive candid charm. He made frequent appearances at public events, in forums, and on television talk shows, making a variety of often controversial public pronouncements—aesthetic, philosophical, and political. In 1955 Mailer was one of the founders of The Village Voice newspaper, and in 1961 he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City.

The Armies of the Night (1968; Pulitzer Prize), a dramatic account of the 1967 anti–Vietnam War march on Washington, D.C., is one of the earliest works to make use of the personalized style that came to be called New Journalism and is one of Mailer's most significant books. In it and in later books and essays, he pioneered the usage of novelistic techniques in nonfiction works. Among his other journalistic works are Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1969), on the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions; A Fire on the Moon (1971), an account of the Apollo 11 moon flight; and the brilliantly novelistic The Executioner's Song (1979, Pulitzer Prize), the epic story of the life and execution of killer Gary Gilmore, a book that many consider his masterpiece. The Prisoner of Sex (1971) is Mailer's generally oppositional response to the women's liberation movement. He also wrote "interpretive biographies,"Oswald's Tale (1995), a study of the life of President Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald , and Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (1995), on the youth of Pablo Picasso .

Mailer's later novels tend to be long and intricate, and they met with decidedly mixed reviews: Ancient Evenings (1983), which Mailer considered his best book, is set in pharaonic Egypt; Harlot's Ghost (1991) is a complex cold-war spy novel; and The Castle in the Forest (2007) is a fictional exploration of the boyhood of Adolf Hitler. A shorter detective novel, Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984), was made into a film in 1985. He also wrote, directed, and acted in several movies, e.g., Maidstone (1970). Among his other works are the nonfiction The White Negro (1958), Advertisements for Myself (1959), and Marilyn (1973), a study of Marilyn Monroe .

Bibliography: See the large retrospective anthology of his work, The Time of Our Time (1998), and anthology of his writings on writing, The Spooky Art (2003); J. M. Lennon, ed., Pontifications: Interviews (1982) and Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988); memoir, A Ticket to the Circus, by his sixth wife, N. Church Mailer (2010); biographies by H. Mills (1982), P. Manso (1986), C. Rollyson (1991), and M. V. Dearborn (1999); studies by B. H. Leeds (1969, 2002), L. Braudy, ed. (1972), R. Poirier (1972), J. Radford (1975), R. Merrill (1978, 1992), S. Cohen (1979), J. M. Lennon, ed. (1986), H. Bloom, ed. (1986, repr. 2003), J. Wenke (1987), N. Leigh (1990), M. K. Glenday (1995), and B. H. Leeds (2002); bibliography by B. Sokoloff (1985).

Mailer, Norman (Kingsley) (1923– ), American novelist and essayist, educated at Harvard, whose naturalistic first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) was based on his experiences with the army in the Pacific. Most of his work is of a more unorthodox genre, mixing journalism, autobiography, political commentary, and fictional passages in a wide range of styles. The Executioner's Song (1979), a lengthy non-fiction account of a murderer, bears some resemblance to In Cold Blood by Capote. (See also faction.) His lengthy and ambitious novel Ancient Evenings (1983; described by A. Burgess as possibly ‘one of the great works of contemporary mythopoesis’) is set in ancient Egypt (1290–1100 bc). His other novels include Barbary Shore (1951), The Deer Park (1955), Advertisements for Myself (1959), The Presidential Papers (1963), An American Dream (1965), The Armies of the Night (1968), Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984, a thriller), Harlot's Ghost (1991, an analysis of the CIA), and The Gospel According to the Son (1997). He has also written biographies, including studies of Lee Harvey Oswald (1995) and Picasso (1995).

Mailer, Norman (1923– ) US novelist. Mailer's debut novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), was one of the major works on World War II. His combative political journalism, such as Why are we in Vietnam? (1967) and The Prisoner of Sex (1971), aroused great controversy. Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner's Song (1979) both won Pulitzer Prizes. Mailer has experimented with a variety of genres, from thrillers such as Tough Guy's Don't Dance (1984), to historical novels such as Ancient Evenings (1983). The Gospel According to the Son (1997) was a political reworking of the life of Jesus.