Norman Mailer

Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, The Naked and the Dead' is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in the glories of the Allied victory, it altered forever the popular perception of warfare. Focusing on the experiences of a fourteen-man platoon stationed on a Japanese-held island in the South Pacific during World War II, and written in a journalistic style, it tells the moving story of the soldiers' struggle to retain a sense of dignity amidst the horror of warfare, and to find a source of meaning in their lives amisdst the sounds and fury of battle.

October 21, 1967, Washington, D. C. 20,000 to 200,000 protesters are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day's events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mould of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth. The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties' tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak.

Politics, war, sex, boxing, and the art of writing: an era's most controversial writer at his slashing and provocative best The electric and fearless essays of Norman Mailer were essential to the intellectual climate of 1960s America. Here, gathered into one volume for the first time by acclaimed Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon, are all the essential essays from the classic collections The Presidential Papers (1963), Cannibals and Christians (1966), and Existential Errands (1972), each a fascinating window on one of the most extraordinary and tumultuous decades in the nation's history. A self-appointed exorcist of the culture's demons and an unrestrained mythologizer of his own identity, Mailer contemplated and often skewered icons of politics and literature, charted psychosexual undercurrents and covert power plays, and gloried in the exercise of a pugnacious prose style that was all his own. Whether writing about Jackie Kennedy or Sonny Liston, the realist tradition in America or the internal culture wars of the Republican Party, the death of Ernest Hemingway or the battle against censorship, Mailer was always ready to intervene in what he called "the years of the plague." LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Fifty years after the turmoil of 1968, modern America's most turbulent decade comes to life though the collected writings of its greatest literary provocateur No writer plunged more wholeheartedly into the chaotic energies of the 1960s than Norman Mailer, as he fearlessly revolutionized literary norms and genres to capture the political, social, and sexual explosions of an unsettled era. Here, in a deluxe two-volume Library of America boxed set, are two novels, two book-length masterpieces of new journalism, and thirty-three essays. Four Books of the 1960s presents An American Dream, Mailer's hallucinatory voyage through the dark night of an America awash in money, sex, and violence; Why Are We in Vietnam?, in which a motor-mouthed 18-year-old Texan on the eve of military service recounts with manic and obscene exuberance a grizzly bear hunt in Alaska that exposes the macho roots of the war; and the acclaimed "non-fiction novel" The Armies of the Night(winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award) and its follow-up Miami and the Siege of Chicago, on-the-scene/in-the-scene accounts of an antiwar march on the Pentagon and the party conventions of 1968. In these revolutionary books Mailer cast himself as a player in the drama he reports, bringing a sharp and merciless eye on the decade's political upheavals. In Collected Essays of the 1960s acclaimed Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon gathers for the first time all the essential essays from the classic collections The Presidential Papers (1963), Cannibals and Christians (1966), and Existential Errands (1972), each a fascinating window on one of the most extraordinary and tumultuous decades in the nation's history. Whether writing about Jackie Kennedy or Sonny Liston, the realist tradition in America or the internal culture wars of the Republican Party, the death of Ernest Hemingway or the battle against censorship, Mailer was always ready to intervene in what he called "the years of the plague." LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Four Mailer classics in one volume for the first time, books that crackle with the creative energy and raw passions of America's most turbulent decade No writer plunged more wholeheartedly into the chaotic energies of the 1960s than Norman Mailer, as he fearlessly revolutionized literary norms and genres to capture the political, social, and sexual explosions of an unsettled era. Here, for the first time in one volume, are his unforgettable books of the 1960s: two disruptive and visionary novels, and two radically innovative journalistic masterpieces. War hero, television star, existential hipster, seducer, murderer: such is the protagonist of An American Dream, Mailer's hallucinatory voyage through the dark night of an America awash in money, sex, and violence. In Why Are We in Vietnam? a motor-mouthed 18-year-old Texan on the eve of military service recounts with manic and obscene exuberance a grizzly bear hunt in Alaska that exposes the macho roots of the war. The acclaimed "non-fiction novel" The Armies of the Night (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award) and its follow-up Miami and the Siege of Chicago are on-the-scene, in-the-scene accounts of an antiwar march on the Pentagon and the party conventions of 1968, as Mailer casts himself as a player in the drama he reports, bringing a sharp and merciless eye on the decade's political upheavals. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

"It is impossible to walk away from this novel without being sharply reminded of the fact that Norman Mailer is a writer of extraordinary ability."--Chicago Tribune Featuring a new foreword by Mailer scholar Maggie McKinley Published nearly twenty years after Norman Mailer's fiction debut, The Naked and the Dead, this acclaimed novel further solidified the author's stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Ranald "D. J." Jethroe, Texas's most precocious teenager, recounts a brutal hunting trip he took to Alaska--in a story of fathers and sons, myth and masculinity, character and corruption. Both entertaining and profound, Why Are We in Vietnam? is an exceptional, timeless work awaiting discovery by a new generation of readers. Praise for Why Are We in Vietnam? "A book of great integrity. All the old qualities are here: Mailer's remarkable feeling for the sensory event, the detail, 'the way it was, ' his power and energy."--The New York Review of Books "A tour de force, a treatise on human nature."--The Dallas Morning News "A brilliant piece of writing."--Newsweek "Original, courageous, and provocative."--The New York Times

In this landmark work of journalism, Norman Mailer reports on the presidential conventions of 1968, the turbulent year from which today's bitterly divided country arose. The Vietnam War was raging; Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy had just been assassinated. In August, the Republican Party met in Miami and picked Richard Nixon as its candidate, to little fanfare. But when the Democrats backed Lyndon Johnson's ineffectual vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the city of Chicago erupted. Antiwar protesters filled the streets and the police ran amok, beating and arresting demonstrators and delegates alike, all broadcast on live television--and captured in these pages by one of America's fiercest intellects. Praise for Miami and the Siege of Chicago "For historians who wish for the presence of a world-class literary witness at crucial moments in history, Mailer in Miami and Chicago was heaven-sent."--Michael Beschloss, The Washington Post "Extraordinary . . . Mailer predicted that] 'we will be fighting for forty years.' He got that right, among many other things."--Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic "Often reads like a good, old-fashioned novel in which suspense, character, plot revelations, and pungently describable action abound."--The New York Review of Books " A] masterful account . . . To understand 1968, you must read Mailer."--Chicago Tribune

One of the greatest writers of the 20th century captures the definitive event of modern science. Discover the men, the machinery, and the sheer thrill of the lunar mission with Norman Mailerâ??s dazzling account of the Apollo 11 adventure, illustrated by hundreds of photographs.

Amid the cactus wilds some two hundred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place for starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic, Desert D'Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want--and how far they are willing to go to get it. As Mailer traces their couplings and uncouplings, their uneasy flirtation with success and self-extinction, he creates a legendary portrait of America's machinery of desire. Praise for The Deer Park "A scathing portrayal of Hollywood . . . studded with brilliant and illuminating passages."--The New York Times Book Review "A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent . . . Mailer] drives us up and down The Deer Park at breakneck speed. It is a trip through unfamiliar country, for a time funny and then unnerving."--The New Yorker "Savage . . . brilliant . . . exhilarating."--The Atlantic Monthly "Entertaining and wise . . . In addition to his furious energy and true ear, Mailer is simpatico with humanity . . . on a level rare in American fiction."--The New Republic Praise for Norman Mailer " Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation."--The New York Times "A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent."--The New Yorker "Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure."--The Washington Post "A devastatingly alive and original creative mind."--Life "Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance."--The New York Review of Books "The largest mind and imagination in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book."--Chicago Tribune "Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream."--The Cincinnati Post

Published at the height of the McCarthy era, Norman Mailer's audacious novel of socialism is at once an elegy and an indictment, a sinuous moral thriller and an intellectual slugfest. Wounded during World War II, Mike Lovett is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. But when Lovett rents a room in Brooklyn, he finds that his housemates have secrets of their own: One betrays a husband no one ever sees; another may have been a Communist executioner. Combining Kafkaesque unease with Orwellian paranoia, Barbary Shore plays havoc with our certainties and delivers its effects with a force that is pure Mailer. Praise for Barbary Shore "A work of remarkable power, of amazing penetration, both into people and the determining forces of American life."--The Atlantic Monthly "Vibrant with life, abundant with real people . . . Mailer has] a scintillating skill in observation, a mature sense of meaning."--The Philadelphia Inquirer "This book is nothing short of amazing."--Newsweek "Barbary Shore is] about the kind of country--and what you might call the psychic territory--that American war heroes were returning to."--The Guardian Praise for Norman Mailer " Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation."--The New York Times "A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent."--The New Yorker "Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure."--The Washington Post "A devastatingly alive and original creative mind."--Life "Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance."--The New York Review of Books "The largest mind and imagination in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book."--Chicago Tribune "Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream."--The Cincinnati Post

A genuine literary event--an illuminating collection of correspondence from one of the most acclaimed American writers of all time Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 30 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific--or more exposed--than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence (approximately 20 million words), many of them deeply personal, keeping a copy of almost every one. Now the best of these are published--most for the first time--in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and, it seems, several lifetimes. Together they form a stunning autobiographical portrait of one of the most original, provocative, and outspoken public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Compiled by Mailer's authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and organized by decade, "Selected Letters of Norman Mailer" features the most fascinating of Mailer's missives from 1940 to 2007--letters to his family and friends, to fans and fellow writers (including Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth), to political figures from Henry Kissinger to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and to such cultural icons as John Lennon, Marlon Brando, and even Monica Lewinsky. Here is Mailer the precocious Harvard undergraduate, writing home to his parents for the first time and worrying that his acceptances by literary magazines were "all happening too easy." Here, too, is Mailer the soldier, confronting the violence of war in the Pacific, which would become the subject of his masterly debut novel, "The Naked and the Dead" " I'm] amazed how casually it fits into . . . daily life, how very unhorrible it all is." Mailer the international celebrity pledges to William Styron, "I'm going to write every day, and like Lot's Wife I'm consigning myself to a pillar of salt if I dare to look back," while the 1980s Mailer agonizes over the fallout from his ill-fated friendship with Jack Henry Abbott, the murderer who became his literary protege. ("The continuation of our relationship was depressing for both of us," he confesses to Joyce Carol Oates.) At last, he finds domestic--and erotic--bliss in the arms of his sixth wife, Norris Church ("We bounce into each other like sunlight"). Whether he is reflecting on the Kennedy assassination, assessing the merits of authors from Fitzgerald to Proust, or threatening to pummel William Styron, the brilliant, pugnacious Norman Mailer comes alive again in these letters. The myriad faces of this artist and activist, lover and fighter, public figure and private man, are laid bare in this collection as never before. Praise for "Selected Letters of Norman Mailer"" ""As massive as the life they document . . . the autobiography Mailer] never wrote . . . 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 . . . are so tantalizing. They glitter throughout like unrefined jewels that Mailer took to the grave."--"The New Yorker" "Indispensable . . . a subtle document of an unsubtle man's wit and erudition, even (or especially) when it's wielded as a weapon."--"New York" " "Selected Letters of Norman Mailer" has] umpteen pleasures to pluck out and roll between your teeth, like seeds from a pomegranate."--"The New York Times" "From the Hardcover edition."

It has been called the single most historic event of the 20th century: On July 20, 1969, after a decade of tests and training, supported by a staff of 400,000 engineers and scientists, and with a budget of billions, the most powerful rocket ever launched brought Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon. Nobody captured the men, the mood, and the machinery like Norman Mailer, hired by LIFE magazine to cover the mission in a dazzling reportage he later enhanced into the brilliantly crafted book, Of a Fire on the Moon. Rediscover this epoch-making event with TASCHEN’s adaptation of Mailer’s account, now in our popular Reader's Edition so you can really curl up and travel not just back in time, but into outer space. The text is accompanied by hundreds of photographs from the NASA vaults, the archives of LIFE, and other leading magazines of the day, documenting the development of the agency and the mission, life inside the command module and on the moon’s surface, as well as the world’s jubilant reaction to the landing. Captions by leading Apollo 11 experts explain the history and science behind the images, citing the mission log, publications of the day, and postflight astronaut interviews, while an evocative introduction by Colum McCann celebrates Mailer’s incomparable skill at transforming “the science of space...the weight of history...the breadth of mythology” into prose.

In this wild battering ram of a novel, which was originally published to vast controversy in 1965, Norman Mailer creates a character who might be a fictional precursor of the philosopher-killer he would later profile in The Executioner's Song. As Stephen Rojack, a decorated war hero and former congressman who murders his wife in a fashionable New York City high-rise, runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. One part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the reader by the throat and refuses to let go. Praise for An American Dream "Perhaps the only serious New York novel since The Great Gatsby."--Joan Didion, National Review "A devil's encyclopedia of our secret visions and desires . . . the expression of a devastatingly alive and original creative mind."--Life "A work of fierce concentration . . . perfectly, and often brilliantly, realistic with] a pattern of remarkable imaginative coherence and intensity."--Harper's "At once violent, educated, and cool . . . This is our history as Hawthorne might have written it."--Commentary Praise for Norman Mailer " Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation."--The New York Times "A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent."--The New Yorker "Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure."--The Washington Post "A devastatingly alive and original creative mind."--Life "Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance."--The New York Review of Books "The largest mind and imagination in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book."--Chicago Tribune "Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream."--The Cincinnati Post

With his Hollywood good looks, boundless enthusiasm, and mesmeric media presence, John F. Kennedy was destined to capture the imaginations of the more than 70 million Americans who watched the nation’s first televised presidential debate. Just days after beating out Richard Nixon by the narrowest margin in history, Kennedy himself said, “It was the TV more than anything else that turned the tide.” But one man begged to differ: writer Norman Mailer, who bragged that his pro-Kennedy treatise, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” had “won the election for Kennedy.” The article, published in Esquire magazine just weeks before polls opened, redefined political reporting with Mailer's frank, first-person voice identifying Kennedy as the “existential hero” who could awaken the nation from its postwar slumber and conformist Eisenhower years. Both Kennedy and New Journalism had arrived. Now, TASCHEN reimagines and interprets this no-holds-barred portrait of Kennedy on his path to the White House, publishing Mailer’s essay in book form alongside 300 photographs that bring the campaign and the candidate’s family to life. These images were captured by some of the great photojournalists of the day—including Cornell Capa, Henri Dauman, Jacques Lowe, Lawrence Schiller, Paul Schutzer, Stanley Tretick, Hank Walker, and Garry Winogrand—providing a fascinating look at the man who declared the ’60s “a time for greatness.”

Mailer's superb account, written as it was happening, of the first attempt to land men on the moon'Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.'A Fire on the Moon tells the scarcely credible story of the Apollo 11 mission. It is suffused with Mailer's obsession both with the astronauts themselves and with his own anxieties and terrors about the extremity of what they were trying to achieve. Mailer is both admiring and appalled and the result is a book which is both a gripping narrative and a brilliant depiction of the now-forgotten technical issues and uncertainties around the mission. A Fire on the Moon is also a matchless portrait of an America caught in a morass of introspection and misery, torn apart by the war in Vietnam. But for one, extraordinary week in the summer of 1969 all eyes were on the fates of three men in a rocket, travelling a quarter of a million miles away from Earth. With an introduction by Geoff Dyer.

The definitive Norman Mailer collection, as he writes on Marilyn Monroe, culture, ideology, boxing, Hemingway, politics, sex, celebrity and - of course - Norman MailerFrom his early 'A Credo for the Living', published in 1948, when the author was twenty-five, to his final writings in the year before his death, Mailer wrestled with the big themes of his times. He was one of the most astute cultural commentators of the postwar era, a swashbuckling intellectual provocateur who never pulled a punch and was rarely anything less than interesting. Mind of an Outlaw spans the full arc of Mailer's evolution as a writer, including such essential pieces as his acclaimed 1957 meditation on hipsters, 'The White Negro'; multiple selections from his wonderful Advertisements for Myself; and a never-before-published essay on Freud. The book is introduced by Jonathan Lethem.

For many, the moon landing was the defining event of the twentieth century. So it seems only fitting that Norman Mailer--the literary provocateur who altered the landscape of American nonfiction--wrote the most wide-ranging, far-seeing chronicle of the Apollo 11 mission. A classic chronicle of America's reach for greatness in the midst of the Cold War, Of a Fire on the Moon compiles the reportage Mailer published between 1969 and 1970 in Life magazine: gripping firsthand dispatches from inside NASA's clandestine operations in Houston and Cape Kennedy; technical insights into the magnitude of their awe-inspiring feat; and prescient meditations that place the event in human context as only Mailer could. Praise for Of a Fire on the Moon "The gift of a genius . . . a twentieth-century American epic--a Moby Dick of space."--New York "Mailer's account of Apollo 11 stands as a stunning image of human energy and purposefulness. . . . It is an act of revelation--the only verbal deed to be worthy of the dream and the reality it celebrates."--Saturday Review "A wild and dazzling book."--The New York Times Book Review "Still the most challenging and stimulating account of the] mission to appear in print."--The Washington Post Praise for Norman Mailer " Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation."--The New York Times "A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent."--The New Yorker "Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure."--The Washington Post "A devastatingly alive and original creative mind."--Life "Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance."--The New York Review of Books "The largest mind and imagination in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book."--Chicago Tribune "Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream."--The Cincinnati Post

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY "THE GLOBE AND MAIL" Norman Mailer was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century American letters and an acknowledged master of the essay. "Mind of an Outlaw, " the first posthumous publication from this outsize literary icon, collects Mailer's most important and representative work in the form that many rank as his most electrifying. As America's foremost public intellectual, Norman Mailer was a ubiquitous presence in our national life--on the airwaves and in print--for more than sixty years. With his supple mind and pugnacious persona, he engaged society more than any other writer of his generation. The trademark Mailer swagger is much in evidence in these pages as he holds forth on culture, ideology, politics, sex, gender, and celebrity, among other topics. Here is Mailer on boxing, Mailer on Hemingway, Mailer on Marilyn Monroe, and, of course, Mailer on Mailer--the one subject that served as the beating heart of all of his nonfiction. From his early essay "A Credo for the Living," published in 1948, when the author was twenty-five, to his final writings in the year before his death, Mailer wrestled with the big themes of his times. He was one of the most astute cultural commentators of the postwar era, a swashbuckling intellectual provocateur who never pulled a punch and was rarely anything less than interesting. "Mind of an Outlaw" spans the full arc of Mailer's evolution as a writer, including such essential pieces as his acclaimed 1957 meditation on hipsters, "The White Negro"; multiple selections from his seminal collection "Advertisements for Myself;" and a never-before-published essay on Sigmund Freud. Incendiary, erudite, and unrepentantly outrageous, Norman Mailer was a dominating force on the battlefield of ideas. Featuring an incisive Introduction by Jonathan Lethem, "Mind of an Outlaw" forms a fascinating portrait of Mailer's intellectual development across the span of his career as well as the preoccupations of a nation in the last half of the American century. Praise for "Mind of an Outlaw"" "" Mailer's] best and brightest."--"Esquire"" " "The fifty essays collected in this retrospective volume span sixty-four years and show Norman] Mailer (1923-2007) at his brawny, pugnacious, and egotistical best. . . . This provocative collection brims with insights and reflections that show why Mailer is regarded as a great literary mind of his generation."--"Publishers Weekly"" " "The selections open a window onto the capacious mind and process of one of the most volatile intellects of the twentieth century."--"Library Journal"" " "Vintage Mailer: brilliant, infuriating, witty and never, ever boring.""--Tampa Bay Times" "As good an introduction to Mailer's habits of mind as there's ever been."--"Kirkus Reviews"" " "There's no arguing about Mailer the essayist--he was outstanding. . . . These insightful essays educate, argue and persuade on everything from politics and literature to film, philosophy and the human condition."--"Shelf Awareness" "From the Hardcover edition."