A short life of the author
Norman Kingsley Mailer (1923–2007) was born on 31 January 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn. His father was a South African-born accountant; his mother was a formidable woman who ran a small business. Mailer attended Harvard (class of 1943), where he studied aeronautical engineering and decided to become a writer. He served in the Pacific Theatre during the Second World War with the 112th Cavalry Regiment, an experience that produced his first and most commercially successful novel.
Life and Career
The Naked and the Dead (1948, Rinehart), written when Mailer was twenty-five, was a massive critical and commercial success — the most celebrated American war novel since A Farewell to Arms. It made Mailer famous overnight and, as he later acknowledged, burdened him with expectations that shaped the rest of his career.
The next decade was turbulent. Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955) were poorly received. Mailer co-founded The Village Voice in 1955, became a public intellectual, and published Advertisements for Myself (1959), a collection of essays, stories, and self-advertisements that announced his ambition to be not merely a novelist but a “psychic outlaw” — a writer who would engage with American power, sex, violence, and politics at the most dangerous level.
In 1960, at a party at his apartment, Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife, nearly killing her. She declined to press charges; Mailer was committed briefly to Bellevue. The episode haunted his reputation and remains the indelible stain on his legacy.
The 1960s and 1970s were his richest period. An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) were audacious, violent novels. The Armies of the Night (1968), his account of the 1967 march on the Pentagon, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and invented a genre: participatory non-fiction in which the writer places himself at the centre of history. Of a Fire on the Moon (1970), about the Apollo 11 mission, and The Prisoner of Sex (1971), his combative response to feminism, were major cultural events. The Executioner’s Song (1979), a non-fiction novel about the life and execution of Gary Gilmore, won his second Pulitzer Prize.
Later works — Ancient Evenings (1983), Harlot’s Ghost (1991), The Gospel According to the Son (1997), The Castle in the Forest (2007) — were ambitious but unevenly received. Mailer married six times and had nine children. He ran for mayor of New York in 1969 (promising to make the city the fifty-first state) and lost badly. He died on 10 November 2007 in New York.
Major Works and Themes
Mailer’s obsessive subject was the relationship between power and identity — the ways in which individuals and nations create themselves through acts of will, violence, and imagination. He believed that American life was a battleground between conformity and rebellion, and that the writer’s duty was to engage with the most dangerous forces in the culture.
The Armies of the Night (1968) is his masterpiece: an account of the anti-war march on the Pentagon that is simultaneously history, autobiography, social analysis, and literary performance. Mailer writes himself as “Mailer” — a comic, vain, brave, alcoholic public figure — and in doing so invents the New Journalism’s central technique.
The Executioner’s Song (1979) is an 1,100-page “true life novel” about Gary Gilmore, the first man executed in the United States after the reinstatement of the death penalty. It is Mailer’s most controlled and least self-indulgent work — a masterpiece of reportage and narrative construction.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Mailer was one of the most famous writers in the world for fifty years. His reputation has declined since his death, partly because of the stabbing and his combative stance toward feminism, partly because the kind of public literary celebrity he embodied no longer exists. His best work — The Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song, Advertisements for Myself — remains essential American writing.
Key Works
- The Naked and the Dead (1948)
- Advertisements for Myself (1959)
- An American Dream (1965)
- The Armies of the Night (1968) — Pulitzer Prize
- Of a Fire on the Moon (1970)
- The Executioner’s Song (1979) — Pulitzer Prize
Collecting Mailer
Norman Mailer is a moderately collected author with a clear flagship title.
The Naked and the Dead (1948, Rinehart, New York) is the key title. The first edition is identified by the Rinehart imprint and “First Printing” on the copyright page. Fine copies in the original jacket bring $2,000–$8,000. The jacket, which shows a tropical beach scene, is prone to fading.
The Armies of the Night (1968, New American Library) and The Executioner’s Song (1979, Little, Brown) first editions in jacket are available at $100–$500.
Mailer was an enthusiastic signer, and signed copies are widely available. Inscribed copies with substantive messages command premiums. His correspondence is voluminous; letters surface regularly at auction at $200–$2,000.