Norman Mailer (1923–2007,) fully Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist and essayist. He is best known for using “New Journalism,” combining the imaginative subjectivity of literature with journalism’s more objective qualities. His fiction and nonfiction critically assessed the totalitarianism he claimed in the centralized authority system in 20th- and 21st-century America.
Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, Mailer was brought up in Brooklyn, educated at Harvard University, and served in the Pacific during World War II. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948,) an anti-war blast and social satire, became a bestseller, establishing him as a leading novelist of his generation. He maintained his antagonism towards contemporary society in Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955.) This period’s writing documents his progression from liberal socialism to anarchistic libertarianism.
Mailer was a proponent of the ‘New Journalism,’ using novel-writing techniques to portray real people and events. As a polemicist, campaigner, and protester, he was prominent throughout the 1960s, publishing An American Dream (1965,) Why are We in Vietnam? (1967,) and Armies of the Night (1968; National Book award; Pulitzer.) Mailer’s subsequent books include The Executioner’s Song (1979; Pulitzer,) Ancient Evenings (1983,) Harlot’s Ghost (1991,) an account of the CIA from the end of World War II to the assassination of President John F Kennedy, The Spooky Art (2003,) a book about writing, and the novel The Castle in the Forest (2007.)
Mailer published two biographical works, Oswald’s Tale (1995)—a study of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin—and Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (1995.) He has also been engaged as a screenwriter, film director, and actor, with such works as Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987; based on his 1984 thriller.)
Mailer’s notable biographies include Mary V Dearborn’s Mailer: A Biography (1999) and J. Michael Lennon’s Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Norman Mailer
I’m hostile to men, I’m hostile to women, I’m hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I’m afraid of horses.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Security
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution’s in the soul.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Desires, Desire
Once a newspaper touches a story the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: News
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Twentieth Century, Events
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they’re all egomaniacs.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Ego
In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Violence, America
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they’re all egomaniacs.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Liberalism
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Class
Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Honor
What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
—Norman Mailer
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: America
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Sex
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Respect
The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We’re all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
—Norman Mailer
A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Democracy
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Heroes, Achievements, Heroes/Heroism
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Growth
The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Television
As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Fear
I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Motivation, Motivational
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Originality, Pride
Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Lies, Lying, Deception/Lying
Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay … a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Cities, City Life
The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Boredom
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Art, Writers, Authors & Writing
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Photography
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Journalists, Journalism
There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
—Norman Mailer
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Socialism
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
Paul Auster American Novelist, Poet
John Updike American Author
Lloyd Alexander American Writer
John Irving American Novelist
Raymond Chandler American Novelist
Don DeLillo American Author
Peter Matthiessen American Naturalist, Novelist
Sidney Sheldon American Novelist, Screenwriter
Henry Adams American Historian