Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, John McPhee, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of narrative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.
Norman Mailer (born Norman Kingsley Mailer) was born to a well-known Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, was a South Africa-born accountant, and his mother, Fanny Schneider, ran a housekeeping and nursing agency. Mailer's sister, Barbara, was born in 1927. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, he graduated from Boys' High School and entered Harvard University in 1939, where he studied engineering sciences. At Harvard, he became interested in writing and published his first story at the age of 18, winning Story Magazine's college contest in 1941. As an undergraduate, he was a member of The Signet Society. After graduating in 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. In World War II, he served in the Philippines with 112th Cavalry. He was not involved in much combat and completed his service as a cook, but the experience provided enough material for The Naked and the Dead.
In 1948, while continuing his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, Mailer published The Naked and the Dead, based on his military service in World War II. A New York Times best seller for 62 weeks, it was hailed by many as one of the best American wartime novels and named one of the "one hundred best novels in English language" by the Modern Library.
Barbary Shore (1951) was a surreal parable of Cold War left politics set in a Brooklyn rooming-house. His 1955 novel The Deer Park drew on his experiences working as a screenwriter in Hollywood in 1949-50. It was initially rejected by seven publishers due to its purportedly sexual content before being published by Putnam's.
In the tradition of Dickens and Dostoevsky, Mailer wrote his fourth novel, An American Dream as a serial in Esquire magazine, over eight months (January to August 1964), publishing the first chapter only two months after he wrote it. In March 1965, Dial Press published a revised version. His editor was E. L. Doctorow. The novel, which contains perhaps Mailer's most evocative and lyrical prose, received mixed reviews, but was a best seller. Joan Didion praised it in a review in National Review (April 20, 1965) and John W. Aldridge did the same in Life (March 19, 1965), while Elizabeth Hardwick panned it in Partisan Review (spring 1965). Except for a brief period, the novel has never gone out of print and is admired greatly by Mailer partisans.(reference?)
Mailer spent a longer time writing Ancient Evenings, his novel of Egypt in the XX dynasty (about 1100 B.C.E.) than any of his other books, working on it off and on from 1972 until 1983. It was also a bestseller, although reviews were generally negative.
Harlot's Ghost, Mailer's longest novel (1310 pages) appeared in 1991. It is an exploration of the unspoken dramas of the CIA from the end of WWII to 1965. He performed a huge amount of research for the novel, which is still on CIA reading lists. He ended the novel with the words "To be continued," and planned to write a sequel, titled Harlot's Grave. But other projects intervened and he never wrote it. Harlot's Ghost sold well.
His final novel, The Castle in the Forest, which focused on Hitler's childhood, reached number five on the Times best seller list after publication in January 2007, and received stronger reviews than any of his books since The Executioner's Song. Castle was intended to be the first volume of a trilogy, but Mailer died several months after it was completed.
Mailer wrote over 40 books. He published 11 novels over a 59-year stretch.
In the mid-1950s, Mailer became increasingly known for his counter-culture essays. In 1955, he was one of the founders of The Village Voice and wrote a column, "Quickly," from January to April 1956. In Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailer's essay "The White Negro" (1957) examined violence, hysteria, sex, crime and confusion in American society. It is one of the most anthologized essays of the postwar period. He wrote numerous book reviews and essays for Esquire, The New York Review of Books and Dissent Magazine.
Other works include:
In 1968, he received a George Polk Award for his reporting in Harper's magazine.
In addition to his experimental fiction and nonfiction novels, Mailer produced a play version of The Deer Park (staged at the Theatre De Lys in Greenwich Village in 1967), and in the late 1960s directed a number of improvisational avant-garde films in a Warhol style, including Maidstone (1970), which includes a spontaneous and brutal brawl between Norman T. Kingsley, played by himself, and Rip Torn. In 1987, he adapted and directed a film version of his novel Tough Guys Don't Dance, starring Ryan O'Neal and Isabella Rossellini, which has become a minor camp classic.
A number of Mailer's nonfiction works, such as The Armies of the Night and The Presidential Papers, are political. He covered the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1992, and 1996, although his account of the 1996 Democratic convention has never been published. In October 1967, he was arrested for his involvement in an anti-Vietnam War demonstration at the Pentagon. Two years later, he ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic Party primary for Mayor of New York City, allied with columnist Jimmy Breslin (who ran for City Council President), proposing New York City secession and creating a 51st state. Their slogan was "throw the rascals in". He came in fourth in a field of five. (campaign poster here). From 1980 to 2007, he contributed to Democratic party candidacies for political office.
In 1980, Mailer spearheaded convicted killer Jack Abbott's successful bid for parole. In 1977, Abbott had read about Mailer's work on The Executioner's Song and wrote to Mailer, offering to enlighten the author about Abbott's time behind bars and the conditions he was experiencing. Mailer, impressed, helped to publish In the Belly of the Beast, a book on life in the prison system consisting of Abbott's letters to Mailer. Once paroled, Abbott committed a murder in New York City six weeks after his release, stabbing to death 22-year-old Richard Adan. Consequently, Mailer was subject to criticism for his role. In a 1992 interview with the Buffalo News, he conceded that his involvement was "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in.". Mailer did, however, help Abbott after his release, hiring him as a researcher.
In 1989, Mailer joined with a number of other prominent authors in publicly expressing support for colleague Salman Rushdie in the wake of the fatwa calling for Rushdie's assassination issued by Iran's Islamic government for his having authored The Satanic Verses.
In 2003 in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, just before the invasion of Iraq, Mailer said: "Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it."
His biographical subjects have included Pablo Picasso, Muhammad Ali, Gary Gilmore and Lee Harvey Oswald. His 1986 off-Broadway play Strawhead starring his daughter, Kate Mailer, was about Marilyn Monroe. His 1973 biography of Monroe, Marilyn: A Novel Biography was particularly controversial: in its final chapter he stated that she was murdered by agents of the FBI and CIA who resented her supposed affair with Robert F. Kennedy. He later admitted that these speculations were "not good journalism."
Despite these problems, the biography was enormously successful and sold more copies than any Mailer book except Naked and the Dead. Its speculations and ruminations on the inner life of the tortured actress, and her apposite commitments to both acting and to media celebrity, have kept it in print continuously since publication.
Mailer was married six times, and had several mistresses. He had eight biological children by his various wives, and adopted one child. Until he died, he had a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights as well as a house on the Cape Cod oceanfront in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Like many novelists of his generation, Mailer struggled with alcohol and drug abuse throughout his life.
He appeared in an episode of Gilmore Girls entitled "Norman Mailer, I'm Pregnant!" with his son Stephen Mailer.
In 2005, he co-wrote a book with his youngest child, John Buffalo Mailer, entitled The Big Empty. In 2007 Random House published his last novel, The Castle in the Forest.
One of his mistresses, Carole Mallory, recently sold seven boxes of documents and photographs to Harvard University. They contain extracts of her letters, books and journals.
Mailer died of acute renal failure on the morning of November 10, 2007, a month after undergoing lung surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, New York.
