Norman Mailer Biography and List of Works

American author, innovator of non-fiction novels. Mailer developed a form of journalism that combines actual events with the richness of a novel, mixing autobiography, political commentary, and fictional passages in a wide variety of styles. (See also Truman Capote and the classic "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood.) In the 1960s and 1970s Mailer won admiration for his journalism. Mailer's works have arisen controversy but his stylish nonconformity has often concealed a fundamental conservatism of values.

'"I decided the only explanation is that God and the Devil are very attentive to people at the summit. I don't know if they stir much in the average man's daily stew, no great sport for spooks, I would suppose, in a ranch house, but do you expect God or the Devil left Lenin and Hitler and Churchill alone? No. They bid for favors and exact revenge. That's why men with power sometimes act so silly."'
(from An American Dream, 1965)

Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, but he was raised in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of nine he wrote a 250-page story in the notebooks, called 'Invasion From Mars'. He graduated from Boys High School in 1939 and studied at Harvard University, Cambridge (1939-43), receiving S.B. in aeronautical engineering. In 1941 Mailer won Story magazine's college contest with a story entitled 'The Greatest Thing in the World'.

During World War II, Mailer was a sergeant in the United States Army. He served in Leyte, Luzon, and Japan. Mailer was discharged in 1946. He wrote in fifteen months THE NAKED AND THE DEAD. In 1947 he enrolled at the Sorbonne, and made his international breakthrough with his first novel, which was published when he was just 25. The Naked and The Dead drew upon the author's combat experiences in the Philippines. Subsequent novels did not receive similar respect, among them BARBARY SHORE (1951), which was set in a Brooklyn boarding house and depicted the conflict between a former radical and a federal agent.

In the late 1940s Mailer worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter. He moved in 1951 to Greenwich Village in New York City. Mailer's third novel, THE DEER PARK (1955), was about the corruption of values in Hollywood. In the thinly veiled story Mailer depicted his relationship with Adele Morales, an artist whom he married in 1954. The following years in the author's life were more or less chaotic and in 1960 he stabbed Adele at the end of an all-night party in Manhattan. Mailer was given a suspended sentence because Adele refused to press charges.

In the mid-1950s Mailer started to gain fame as an anti-establishment essayist. In the 1960s he was listed among the New Journalists, who applied the techniques of novel writing to depict real events and people. He co-founded and named the Village Voice, one of the earliest underground American newspapers. He was a columnist ("Big Bite") at Esquire (1962-63) and Commentary (1962-63), a member of the executive board (1968-73), and the president (1984-86) of PEN American Centre. In 1969 he was an independent candidate for mayor of New York City.

"Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the Gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision."
(from The Presidental Papers, 1963)

THE PRESIDENTAL PAPERS (1963) established Mailer as one of the most vigorous essayist in America. He used in THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT (1968) the techniques of fiction, and studied his own reactions as a barometer of the events themselves. The work won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1969. In the same vein he wrote MIAMI AND THE SIEGE OF CHIGACO (1968) and OF A FIRE ON THE MOON (1970).

Mailer has written on the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions since 1960. He has placed himself at the centre of American political and cultural life and reported his observations on civil rights movements, political assassinations and other upheavals. Mailer has published essays in popular men's magazines, such as Esquire and Playboy, as well as in more intellectual journals like Dissent, Commentary, and the New York Review of Books.

In the 1970s Mailer became a target of feminist attack. In THE PRISONER OF SEX (1971) Mailer proposed that gender might determine the way a person perceives and orders reality. He was depicted as the quintessential male chauvinist pig in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. He wrote a biography of the life and career of Marilyn Monroe, and published a highly successful true-life novel, THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG (1979) - In Cold Blood in Mailer's style. The story was based on the life and death of a convicted killer Gary Gilmore. THE FIGHT (1975) was a nearly metaphysical account of the bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.

"Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existence in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is."
(from Ancient Evenings)

Mailer's ambitious novel, ANCIENT EVENINGS (1983), was set in ancient Egypt (1290-1100 BC). It was characterized by Anthony Burgess as "one of the great works of contemporary mythopoesis". With TOUGH GUYS DON'T DANCE (1984), a thriller, Mailer returned to the movie business - he wrote the screenplay for the film and directed it. The protagonist, Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer addicted to bourbon and women, awakens with a hangover. He remembers practically nothing of the night before and then finds from the nearby woods a severed head of a blonde. "Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought. Waking from nightmares and sleeping in terror, I climbed at last onto one conclusion. Assuming I was no part of this deed - and how could I be certain of that? - I still had to ask: Who was?" HARLOT'S GHOST (1992) was a 1300 page long chronicle of the CIA. While gathering material for the book, Mailer also found not previously known Russian documents for OSWALD'S TALE (1995), his exhaustive biography of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Mailer has written some thirty controversial and widely translated works. His next large novel under work is the second part of Harlot's Ghost.

THE NAKED AND THE DEAD: Not so funny as Heller's Catch-22 or Jaroslav Hašek's Good Soldier Schweik, more realistic than Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front, and not so sentimental as Hemingway's Farewell to Arms. The story depicts a group of American soldiers, who are stationed on a Japanese-held island in the Pacific. Flashbacks that illuminate their past mix with feverish combat scenes. When the book appeared in 1949, it was on the other hand hailed as one of the finest American novels of WW II, and on the other criticized as obscene and plainly motivated by personal disgust with army life.

For further reading: Ex-Friends by Norman Podhoretz (1999); Mailer: A Biography by Mary V. Dearborn (1999); The Last Party by Adele Mailer (1997); Norman Mailer by Michael K. Glenday (1995); Norman Mailer Revisited by R. Merrill (1992); The Lives of Norman Mailer by C.E. Rollyson (1991); Radical Fiction and the Novels of Norman Mailer by N. Leigh (1990); Norman Mailer's America by Joseph Wenke (1987); Critical Essays on Norman Mailer, ed. by J. Michael Lennon (1986); Norman Mailer, ed. by Harold Bloom (1986); Norman Mailer: His Life and Times, ed. by Peter Manso (1985); Mailer: A Biography by Hilary Mills (1982); Norman Mailer by Robert Erlich (1978); Existential Battles by Laura Adams (1976)

THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, (1948)