Selected Letters of Norman Mailer

Description

Mailer wrote almost 50,000 letters over the course of his life, keeping a copy of almost every one of them. He corresponded with presidents and politicians, artists and athletes, writers and editors, students, antagonists, fans, friends, his children, his loves, including his beloved sixth wife, Norris Church Mailer. Here are the letters of a precocious sixteen-year-old arriving from Brooklyn at Harvard. Here are the letters depicting the horrors of the war in the Pacific from a soldier's point of view. Here are the letters describing a young writer's struggle with his first novel, a manuscript that would become The Naked and the Dead. And here are the many, many letters of a man who spent sixty years in the spotlight. Read together, they form an autobiographical portrait of Norman Mailer.

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, NORMAN MAILER was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the 20th century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner's Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City. J. MICHAEL LENNON is Norman Mailer's archivist and authorized biographer, and Emeritus Vice President for Academic Affairs and Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania. In addition to being chair of the editorial board of The Mailer Review, he has written or edited several books about and with Mailer, including Norman Mailer- A Double Life, Norman Mailer- Works and Days, and On God- An Uncommon Conversation. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Mailer Review, Playboy, and New York, among others.

"Extraordinary."-Vanity Fair "As massive as the life they document . . . In reading Mailer's correspondence as the autobiography he never wrote, these [letters] provide a kind of map, from the hills and rice paddies of the Philippines through every victory and defeat for the rest of the century and beyond."-Esquire "The shards and winks at Mailer's own past that are scattered throughout the letters-the stories of friendships and of family, of his identity-forming relationship with his mother and his 'Victorian childhood' surrounded by loving women, of his street-corner adolescence and his erotic and literary awakening . . . are so tantalizing. They glitter throughout like unrefined jewels that Mailer took to the grave."-The New Yorker " umpteen pleasures to pluck out and roll between your teeth, like seeds from a pomegranate."-The New York Times "Indispensable . . . a subtle document of an unsubtle man's wit and erudition, even (or especially) when it's wielded as a weapon."-New York "A thrilling and revealing collection of correspondence . . . With their unguarded directness, the letters allow us access to [Mailer's] naked thought. . . . providing the asides and stage whispers that shape the life and career into a compelling theatre of the creative self."-The Guardian (U.K.) "Mailer's correspondence offers an intimate look at the author in all his variety: filial, pugnacious, collegial, spiteful, affectionate, defiant and generous by turn."-BBC "[A] meticulously edited collection of letters . . . It's hard to imagine any American novelist today living as large, varied, and morally complex a life as Mailer's. And among the emotions these letters may evoke in readers is nostalgia for a time when an American writer could imagine-somewhat innocently perhaps-that his words were an essential part of the national conversation."-The Daily Beast "[Norman Mailer] contained multitudes. . . . The preponderant majority of letters here are by the private Mailer who could be remarkably tender, courtly, generous, sensitive, eloquent and brilliant and, for good measure, equally block-headed, arrogant, naive and blinded by self-delusion. . . . It's what makes this, far and away, the most important and compelling book by or about Norman Mailer in decades."-The Buffalo News "Norman Mailer lived large. So it's no surprise his correspondents included just about everyone who was anyone in twentieth-century America, and why Selected Letters of Norman Mailer is such a scintillating read."-WBUR "Mailer's ambition to be the greatest writer of his generation is made clear in his stylish, sophisticated letters. . . . A list of Mailer's correspondents reads like a guide to twentieth-century history and literature. . . . [Michael J.] Lennon proves an ideal guide, expertly assembling a tidal wave of letters into a tidy, chronological selection. In the end, Mailer's letters stand as the best autobiography available for such a complicated and extraordinary life."-Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Offers the fascinating complexities of a deeply intelligent individual."-Booklist "An intriguing look at a particularly influential life of letters and a treat for Mailer fans."-Kirkus Reviews "Mailer's letters reinforce the idea that Mailer himself was his most complex creation: the blithely gargantuan demands of his imagination shaped his life was well as his fiction and journalism."-The Arts Fuse