Norman Mailer

Nachem Malech Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007), known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American writer, journalist, and filmmaker. In a career spanning more than six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II.

His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948 and brought him early renown. His 1968 nonfiction novel The Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction as well as the National Book Award. Among his other well-known works are An American Dream (1965), The Fight (1975) and The Executioner's Song (1979), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Mailer is considered an innovator of "creative nonfiction" or "New Journalism", along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, a genre that uses the style and devices of literary fiction in factual journalism. He was a prominent cultural commentator and critic, expressing his often controversial views through his novels, journalism, frequent press appearances, and essays, the most famous and reprinted of which is "The White Negro". In 1955, he and three others founded The Village Voice, an arts and politics-oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village.

In 1960, Mailer was convicted of assault and served a three-year probation after he stabbed his wife Adele Morales with a penknife, nearly killing her. In 1969, he ran an unsuccessful campaign to become the mayor of New York, finishing fourth in the Democratic primaries. Mailer was married six times and had nine children.

Nachem "Norman" Malech ("King") Mailer was born to a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey, on January 31, 1923. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, popularly known as "Barney", was an accountant born in South Africa. His mother, Fanny (née Schneider), ran a housekeeping and nursing agency. Both of his parents were of Lithuanian Jewish descent. Mailer's sister, Barbara, was born in 1927.

Mailer was raised in Brooklyn, first in Flatbush on Cortelyou Road and later in Crown Heights at the corner of Albany and Crown Streets. He graduated from Boys High School and entered Harvard College in 1939, when he was 16 years old. As an undergraduate, he was a member of the Signet Society. At Harvard, he majored in engineering but took writing courses as electives. He published his first story, "The Greatest Thing in the World", at age 18, winning Story magazine's college contest in 1941.

Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943 with a Bachelor of Science with honors. He married his first wife Beatrice "Bea" Silverman in January 1944, just before he was drafted into the U.S. Army. Hoping to gain a deferment from service, Mailer argued that he was writing an "important literary work" that pertained to the war. The deferral was denied, and Mailer was forced to enter the Army. After training at Fort Bragg, he was stationed in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry.

During his time in the Philippines, Mailer was first assigned to regimental headquarters as a typist, then assigned as a wire lineman. In early 1945, after volunteering for a reconnaissance platoon, he completed more than two dozen patrols in contested territory and engaged in several firefights and skirmishes. After the Japanese surrender, he was sent to Japan as part of the army of occupation, was promoted to sergeant, and became a first cook.

When asked about his war experiences, he said that the army was "the worst experience of my life, and also the most important". While in Japan and the Philippines, Mailer wrote to his wife Bea almost daily, and these approximately 400 letters became the foundation of The Naked and the Dead. He drew on his experience as a reconnaissance rifleman for the central action of the novel: a long patrol behind enemy lines.

Mailer wrote 12 novels in 59 years. After completing courses in French language and culture at the University of Paris in 1947–48, he returned to the U.S. shortly after The Naked and the Dead was published in May 1948. A New York Times best seller for 62 weeks, it was the only one of Mailer's novels to reach the number one position. It was hailed by many as one of the best American wartime novels and included in a list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the Modern Library. The book that made his reputation sold more than a million copies in its first year, (three million by 1981) and has never gone out of print. It is still considered to be one of the finest depictions of Americans in combat during World War II.

Barbary Shore (1951) was not well received by the critics. It was a surreal parable of Cold War leftist politics set in a Brooklyn rooming-house, and Mailer's most autobiographical novel. His 1955 novel, The Deer Park drew on his experiences working as a screenwriter in Hollywood from 1949 to 1950. It was initially rejected by seven publishers due to its purportedly sexual content before being published by Putnam's. It was not a critical success, but it made the best-seller list, sold more than 50,000 copies its first year, and is considered by some critics to be the best Hollywood novel since Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust.

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 two months after he wrote it. In March 1965, Dial Press published a revised version. The novel generally 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). Mailer's fifth novel, Why Are We in Vietnam? was even more experimental in its prose than An American Dream. Published in 1967, its critical reception was mostly positive, with many critics, like John Aldridge in Harper's Magazine, calling the novel a masterpiece and comparing it to Joyce. Mailer's obscene language was criticized by Granville Hicks writing in the Saturday Review and the anonymous reviewer in Time. Eliot Fremont-Smith called the novel "the most original, courageous and provocative novel so far this year" that's likely to be "mistakenly reviled". Other critics, such as Denis Donoghue from the New York Review of Books praised Mailer for his verisimilitude "for the sensory event". Donoghue recalls Josephine Miles' study of the American Sublime, suggesting that the impact of Why Are We in Vietnam? was in its voice and style.

In 1972, Joyce Carol Oates called Vietnam "Mailer's most important work"; it is "an outrageous little masterpiece" that "contains some of Mailer's finest writing" and thematically echoes John Milton's Paradise Lost.

In 1980, The Executioner's Song, Mailer's "real-life novel" of the life and death of murderer Gary Gilmore, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Joan Didion reflected the views of many readers when she called the novel "an absolutely astonishing book" at the end of her front-page review in the New York Times Book Review.

From the mid-1950s, Mailer became known for his countercultural essays. In 1955, he co-founded The Village Voice and was initially an investor and silent partner, but later he wrote a column called "Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers" from January to April 1956. His articles published in this column, 17 in total, were important in his development of a philosophy of hip, or "American existentialism", and allowed him to discover his penchant for journalism.

Mailer's famous essay "The White Negro" (1957) fleshes out the hipster figure who stands in opposition to forces that seek debilitating conformity in American society.

It is believed to be among the most anthologized, and controversial, essays of the postwar period. Mailer republished it in 1959 in his miscellany Advertisements for Myself, which he described as "The first work I wrote with a style I could call my own." The reviews were positive, and most commentators referred to it as his breakthrough work.

In 1960, Mailer wrote "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" for Esquire magazine, an account of the emergence of John F. Kennedy during the Democratic Party convention. The essay was an important breakthrough for the New Journalism of the 1960s, but when the magazine's editors changed the title to "Superman Comes to the Supermart", Mailer was enraged, and would not write for Esquire for years. (The magazine later apologized. Subsequent references are to the original title.)

Mailer took part in the October 1967 march on the Pentagon, but initially had no intention of writing a book about it. After conversations with his friend, Willie Morris, editor of Harper's magazine, he agreed to produce a long essay describing the march. In a concentrated effort, he produced a 90,000-word piece in two months, and it appeared in Harper's March issue. It was the longest nonfiction piece to be published by an American magazine. As one commentator states, "Mailer disarmed the literary world with Armies. The combination of detached, ironic self-presentation [he described himself in the third person], deft portraiture of literary figures (especially Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, and Paul Goodman), a reported flawless account of the March itself, and a passionate argument addressed to a divided nation, resulted in a sui generis narrative praised by even some of his most inveterate revilers." Alfred Kazin, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said, "Mailer's intuition is that the times demand a new form. He has found it." He later expanded the article to a book, The Armies of the Night (1968), awarded a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

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), which had a four-month run and generally good reviews. In 2007, months before he died, he re-wrote the script, and asked his son Michael, a film producer, to film a staged production in Provincetown, but had to cancel because of his declining health. Mailer obsessed over The Deer Park more than he did over any other work.

In the late 1960s, Mailer directed three improvisational avant-garde films: Wild 90 (1968), Beyond the Law (1968), and Maidstone (1970). The latter includes a spontaneous and brutal brawl between Norman T. Kingsley, played by Mailer, and Kingsley's half-brother Raoul, played by Rip Torn. Mailer received a head injury when Torn struck him with a hammer, and Torn's ear became infected when Mailer bit it. In 2012, the Criterion Collection released Mailer's experimental films in a box set, "Maidstone and Other Films by Norman Mailer".

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.

Mailer took on an acting role in the 1981 Miloš Forman film version of E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime, playing Stanford White. In 1999, he played Harry Houdini in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2, which was inspired by the events surrounding the life of Gary Gilmore.

In 1976, Mailer went to Italy for several weeks to collaborate with Italian Spaghetti Western filmmaker Sergio Leone on an adaptation of the Harry Grey novel The Hoods.

Mailer's approach to biography came from his interest in the ego of the artist as an "exemplary type". His own biographer, J. Michael Lennon, explains that Mailer would use "himself as a species of divining rod to explore the psychic depths" of disparate personalities, like Pablo Picasso, Muhammad Ali, Gary Gilmore, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Marilyn Monroe. "Ego," states Lennon, "can be seen as the beginning of a major phase in his writing career: Mailer as biographer."

Beginning as an assignment from Lawrence Schiller to write a short preface to a collection of photographs, Mailer's 1973 biography of Monroe (usually designated Marilyn: A Biography) was not approached as a traditional biography. Mailer read the available biographies, watched Monroe's films, and looked at photographs of Monroe; for the rest of it, Mailer stated, "I speculated." Since Mailer did not have the time to thoroughly research the facts surrounding her death, his speculation led to the biography's controversy. The book's final chapter theorizes that Monroe was murdered by rogue agents of the FBI and CIA who resented her supposed affair with Robert F. Kennedy. Mailer later admitted that he embellished the book with speculations about Monroe's sex life and death that he did not himself believe to ensure its commercial success. In his own autobiography, Monroe's former husband Arthur Miller wrote that Mailer saw himself as Monroe "in drag, acting out his own Hollywood fantasies of fame and sex unlimited and power."

The book was enormously successful; it sold more copies than did any of Mailer's works except The Naked and the Dead, and it is Mailer's most widely reviewed book. It was the inspiration for the Emmy-nominated TV movie Marilyn: The Untold Story, which aired in 1980. Two later works co-written by Mailer presented imagined words and thoughts in Monroe's voice: the 1980 book Of Women and Their Elegance and the 1986 play Strawhead, which was produced off Broadway starring his daughter Kate Mailer.

In the wake of the Marilyn controversy, Mailer attempted to explain his unique approach to biography. He suggests that his biography must be seen as a "species of novel ready to play by the rules of biography." Exemplary egos, he explains, are best explained by other exemplary egos, and personalities like Monroe's are best left in the hands of a novelist.

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 the early 1960s he was fixated on the figure of President John F. Kennedy, whom he regarded as an "existential hero". In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his work mingled autobiography, social commentary, history, fiction, and poetry in a formally original way that influenced the development of New Journalism.

Mailer held the position that the Cold War was not a positive ideal for America. It allowed the state to become strong and invested in the daily lives of the people. He critiqued conservative politics as they, specifically those of Barry Goldwater, supported the Cold War and an increase in government spending and oversight. This, Mailer argued, stood in opposition with conservative principles such as lower taxes and smaller government. He believed that conservatives were pro-Cold War because that was politically relevant to them and would therefore help them win.

Indeed, Mailer was outspoken about his mistrust of politics in general as a way of meaningful change in America. In Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), he explained his view of "politics-as-property", likening a politician to a property holder who is "never ambivalent about his land, he does not mock it or see other adjacent estates as more deserving than his own." Thus politics is just people trading their influence as capital in an attempt to serve their own interests. This cynical view of politicians serving only themselves perhaps explains his views on Watergate. Mailer saw politics as a sporting event: "If you played for a team, you did your best to play very well, but there was something obscene ... in starting to think there was more moral worth to Michigan than Ohio State." Mailer thought that Nixon lost and was demonized only because he played for the wrong team. President Johnson, Mailer thought, was just as bad as Nixon had been, but he had good charisma so all was forgiven.

In September 1961, Mailer was one of 29 original prominent American sponsors of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee organization with which John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was associated in 1963. In December 1963, Mailer and several of the other sponsors left the organization.

In October 1967, Mailer was arrested for his involvement in an anti–Vietnam War demonstration at the Pentagon sponsored by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. In 1968, he signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the war.

In 1969, at the suggestion of feminist Gloria Steinem, his friend the political essayist Noel Parmentel, and others, Mailer 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 the creation of a 51st state through New York City secession. Although Mailer took stands on a wide range of issues, from opposing "compulsory fluoridation of the water supply" to advocating the release of Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, decentralization was the overriding issue of the campaign. Mailer "foresaw the city, its independence secured, splintering into townships and neighborhoods, with their own school systems, police departments, housing programs, and governing philosophies." Their slogan was "throw the rascals in." Mailer was endorsed by libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, who "believed that 'smashing the urban government apparatus and fragmenting it into a myriad of constituent fragments' offered the only answer to the ills plaguing American cities," and called Mailer's campaign "the most refreshing libertarian political campaign in decades." Mailer finished fourth in a field of five. Looking back on the campaign, journalist and historian Theodore H. White called it "one of the most serious campaigns run in the United States in the last five years. . . . [H]is campaign was considered and thoughtful, the beginning of an attempt to apply ideas to a political situation." Characterizing his campaign, Mailer said: "The difference between me and the other candidates is that I'm no good and I can prove it."