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
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
America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
—Norman Mailer
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
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, Heroes/Heroism
Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Existence, Change
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: Deception/Lying, Lies
I think it’s bad to talk about one’s present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
—Norman Mailer
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
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