Norman mailer

Norman Mailer was born on this day, January 31, in 1923. "I hope you can spend the evening," was Mailer's greeting. "I'm planning to cook dinner for you."

He hoped to write a novel great enough to cause “a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” But his best work was his political and cultural reportage: The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of a Fire on the Moon, and The Executioner’s Song. He spent much of his life reporting facts as if he were writing fiction, and performing—for an audience of gossip columnists and shockable reviewers—a fictional version of his life as though it were fact.

Norman Mailer running for mayor of New York City

David Denby writes about Norman Mailer’s reporting from the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 1968.

Memoir of Norman Mailer's personal assistant during the last four years of his life. Before Mailer started writing his Hitler novel Castle in the Forest he made endless notes on thousands of three-by-five cards, and nearly illegible scribbles on the margins of the pages of numerous books. It seemed to me that most of this early work consisted of defining what he did not want his book to be. Even so, he had completed the first 140 pages of an early version before I came to work for him in…

“As you grow older, there’s no reason why you can’t be wiser as a novelist than you ever were before. You should know more about human nature every year of your life.”

Norman Mailer was known for his toughness and temper, and his letters have plenty of that, but they also show his kindness and generosity with other writers.

#tantamount #publishing Norman Mailer

Pulitzer Prize Recipient Twice, Author. He received world-wide acclaim as an American novelist and journalist of the 20th century, excelling in writings that dealt with social and political unrest of his era, and often wrote in a harsh rhetoric. In 1968, he authored The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the...

1960

Norman Mailer | The Naked and the Dead Jacket design by Karov

He was hell-bent on writing great fiction, but his best work was his journalism

Girls night

Explore Jim Barker's 12461 photos on Flickr!

Advertisements For Myself by Norman Mailer.

Norman Mailer was one of the most powerful writers of the twentieth century, but he never wrote a truly great novel.

The Fight Norman Mailer

“Hemingway, by the grace of his thorough knowledge of hunting and fishing, would exercise a most human and direct appeal to the instincts of small- town men.” Ah, Norman Mailer. What a rarity on the…