A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Norman Mailer, novelist, innovator of the nonfictional novel, essayist, screenwriter and ex political candidate was born to a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey on January 31, 1923. He developed in the 1960s and 1970s a form of journalism, that combines actual events, autobiography, and political commentary with the richness of the novel. Norman Mailer was brought up in Brooklyn, New York. Every summer the family went back to Long Beach, where Mailer's grandparents had a small summer hotel. In 1927 his family moved to the Eastern Parkway section of Brooklyn, where he attended P.S. 161 and Boys' High School. At the age of 16, he entered Harvard University to study aeronautical engineering. At the university, he became interested in writing and published his first story when he was 18. A short story, "The Greatest Thing in the World," which he wrote for the Harvard Advocate, won Story magazine's college fiction prize. Mailer was drafted into the Army in World War II in march 1944, less than a year after graduating with honors from Harvard with a B.S. in engineering, and served in the South Pacific. In 1948, just before enrolling in the Sorbonne in Paris, he wrote a book that made him world-famous: The Naked and the Dead, based on his personal combat experiences in the Philippines. The story depicts a group of American soldiers, who are stationed on the Japanese-held island in the Pacific. Flashbacks that illuminate their past mix with feverish combat scenes. It was hailed by many as one of the best American novels to come out of the war years and named one of the "100 best novels" by the Modern Library. The Naked and the Dead remains one of the classic novels of World War II. In the following years, Mailer worked as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. Much of his work was refused by many publishers. Mailer's next two novels Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), which was rejected by six publishers before being accepted, were not well received, and he turned his literary energies to journalism. He helped found The Village Voice in 1954 and wrote a weekly column for it for a short time. In 1959, Mailer published Advertisements for Myself, a collection of essays, letters and fictions on the subjects of politics, sex, drugs, his own writing, and the works of others. In pieces such as The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (1956) and Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailer examined violence, hysteria, crime, and confusion in American society. Mailer returned to the novel with the publishing of An American Dream (1965), and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), which was nominated for a National Book Award. During the 60s he also developed a hybrid literary form, combining fiction and nonfiction narrative in The Armies of the Night (1968) which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and brought Mailer both popular and critical acclaim, and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), which won a National Book Award for nonfiction. In The Armies of the Night he used the techniques of a novel to explore an October 1967 anti-Vietnam march on the Pentagon, a protest during which he was arrested. During the next ten years, Mailer continued to write prolifically, publishing a wide range of books including Of a Fire on the Moon (1971), a book on the Apollo II moon landing; The Prisoner of Sex (1971), an essay in response to the women's liberation movement. In this book Mailer proposed that gender might determine the way a person perceives and orders reality. He also published Marilyn (1973), a novel biography of Marilyn Monroe; The Fight (1976), a book-length description of the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight in Zaire, Africa, among others. His body of work displays a wide scope, a willingness to explore controversial themes and to experiment with different forms and styles. Mailer returned to a book of the same intense proportions as The Naked and the Dead with The Executioner's Song (1979), a nonfiction novel on the life and execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore. The Executioner's Song won Mailer his second Pulitzer Prize and it also was nominated for the American Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. All reviews lauded Mailer's artistry and agreed that The Executioner's Song was a substantial book produced by a literary master. Long promising an epic multi-volume novel of major importance, Mailer published Ancient Evenings, a work of mythic themes, in 1983. Billed as the first of a two-to-four part cycle, Ancient Evenings, an ambitious and daring work of fiction, is set in Egypt during the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties (1290-1100 B.C.). A number of Mailer's works, such as Armies of the Night, are of a political nature. He established a reputation for political reportage, covering the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1992, and 1996. In 1967, he was arrested, briefly, for his involvement in anti-Vietnam demonstrations. Two years later, he ran unsuccessfully as an independent for Mayor of New York City, allied with columnist Jimmy Breslin (who ran for City Council President), with the agenda of New York City secession and creating a 51st state. Mailer is also noted as a biographer. His subjects have included Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, and Lee Harvey Oswald. In addition to his books, Mailer also has written, produced, directed and acted in several films. Wild 90 (1967), which Mailer produced and directed was an adaptation of his book The Deer Park. Despite terrible reviews, it ran for four months at New York's Theatre de Lys. His second film, Beyond the Law (1968) received positive reviews but did not draw audiences, and his third film, Maidstone (1971), based on The Armies of the Night received mixed reviews. Mailer also wrote the script for the film version of The Executioner's Song and received an Emmy nomination for best adaptation. In the 1980s Mailer had become tired of politics. However, in 1984 he visited the Soviet Union and realized that it was not "the evil empire" but it was a "poor, third-world country". With Tough guys don't dance (1984), a thriller, Mailer returned to movie business - he wrote the screenplay for the film and directed it. The protagonist, Tim Madden, is an unsuccessful writer addicted to bourbon and women. He awakens with a hangover. He remembers practically nothing of the night before and then he finds in the nearby woods the severed head of a blonde. This film was well received at the 1987 Cannes film festival. In 1991 Mailer supported the Persian Gulf War for patriotic reasons - he felt that the U.S. was in a bad state and needed a war. Harlot's Ghost was published in the fall of 1991. At 1,310 pages, it is a work of epic proportion and ambition about the people and the plotitbusngs of the C.I.A. during the crucial decades of the "American Century." While gathering material for it, Mailer also found not previously known Russian documents for Oswald's tale (1995), his exhaustive biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. The gospel according to the son (1997) was a relatively mild retelling of the Jesus story compared to Nikos Kazantzákis novel The Last Temptations of Christ (1955) or Jose Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991). Norman Mailer has been married six times, including, since 1980 to Norris Church, and has nine children. In 1960, Mailer stabbed his second wife Adele Morales with a penknife at a party. She was not seriously injured and Adele refused to press charges, but she later publisher her book of memoirs, The Last Party (1997). The time of our time (1998) was an anthology of Norman Mailer's fiction and non-fiction writings. Mailer celebrated his 80th birthday in New York and published The spooky art (2003), a collection of writings about writing. He was awarded in 2005 the National Book Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Norman Mailer died in New York, on November 10, 2007. He was 84. |
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