Selected Letters of Norman Mailer
Language: English
Published by Random House, 2014
- Hardcover
- Used

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- Title
- Selected Letters of Norman Mailer
- Author
- Mailer, Norman
- Publisher
- Random House
- Publication year
- 2014
- Condition
- Very Good
- Dust jacket
- Dust Jacket Included
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 1400066239
- ISBN 13
- 9781400066230
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 prolificor more exposedthan 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 publishedmost for the first timein 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 Mailers authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and organized by decade,Selected Letters of Norman Mailer features the most fascinating of Mailers missives from 1940 to 2007letters 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: [Im] amazed how casually it fits into . . . daily life, how very unhorrible it all is. Mailer the international celebrity pledges to William Styron, Im going to write every day, and like Lots Wife Im 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 protégé. (The continuation of our relationship was depressing for both of us, he confesses to Joyce Carol Oates.) At last, he finds domesticand eroticbliss 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
Extraordinary.Vanity Fair
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 Mailers 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 mans wit and erudition, even (or especially) when its wielded as a weapon.New York
Umpteen pleasures to pluck out and roll between your teeth, like seeds from a pomegranate.The New York Times
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
J. Michael Lennon is Norman Mailers 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 ofThe Mailer Review, he has written or edited several books about and with Mailer, includingNorman Mailer: A Double Life, Norman Mailer: Works and Days, and On God: An Uncommon Conversation. His work has appeared inThe New Yorker, The Paris Review, and New York, among others. He lives in Westport, Massachusetts.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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