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Selected Letters of Norman Mailer
Novelist, biographer and chronicler of American life', Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was also a prolific letter-writer. Selected from some 45,000 pieces of correspondence, and edited with introductions to each decade by J Michael Lennon, this volume includes letters to family, friends, fellow writers, political figures and cultural icons such as John Lennon and Marlon Brando. It is, in effect, an autobiographical portrait of one of America's greatest writers and one of the 20th century's most provocative intellectuals. American-cut pages.
896 pages, Hardcover
First published October 14, 2014
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601 people want to read
About the author
Norman Mailer
343 books1,420 followersNorman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 6, 2022
Mailer apparently wrote upwards of 40,000 letters--most dictated. What the reader faces is largely unwelcome. This volume is an almost random sample, one chosen to illustrate the number of celebrities he brushed against in his rarefied station. There are few sustained dialogues (the exception is with convict charting a possible course to Marxism and literature) and no footnotes to elucidate. His four marriages, his privileging of fame (see his efforts with Hollywood and then television/Esquire/Vanity Fair) over art, his famed feuds with Gore Vidal and others are all thus approached, but obliquely. The Mailer on display is often loathsome, violent and vain-- he attempts to outspeak the World, he offers avalanches of language, much of it unmoored in the concepts he's approaching with a literary Bushido.
I found myself skimming by the end.
I found myself skimming by the end.
May 3, 2015
By any measure, Norman Mailer (1923–2007) is one of the most important writers of post-World War II America. Over seven decades, he produced powerful and provocative work, beginning with his debut war novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), a work inspired by U.S.A. (1937), the John Dos Passos trilogy that aimed to encompass both American history and the American character. Like Dos Passos, Mailer created an array of characters and a dramatic storyline that celebrate the diversity and expansiveness of his native land, while deploring its darker strains of racism and jingoism. With Advertisements for Myself (1959), he created an exuberant but also self-reflexive (if not always self-reflective) form of writing that presaged the confessional writing of the 1960s and introduced a new persona for the writer, who aimed to make himself the center of consciousness for his times. This intersection of the personal and political reached its apogee in The Armies of the Night (1968), Mailer’s alternately ribald and profound account of protest culture in the Vietnam era. And when that form of self-reflexive journalism became jejune, he scoured his own style and produced a stunning documentary nonfiction novel, The Executioner’s Song (1979), ostensibly an account of Gary Gilmore’s murderous criminality, but in fact nothing less than an encyclopedic immersion in the values of American culture. It is a masterwork that rivals his first great achievement. Finally, in Oswald’s Tale (1995) and The Castle in the Forest (2007), Mailer continued, with undiminished vigor, to explore the roots of evil and its impact on the American psyche.
Mailer had other notable successes—especially his novels of the 1960s, An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), and one of the best books ever written about boxing, The Fight (1975)—but as he acknowledged, he never quite fulfilled his quest to write the great American novel, or any great novel. He wanted to be the American Tolstoy, but he never managed to meld his impressive analytical powers with his characters and plots. He ranked himself highly, but he never fooled himself into believing that he had realized his ambitions. When it came to the novel, he understood his shortcomings. But his efforts to excel in other arts as an actor, director, and playwright, while praiseworthy for a certain daring, also demeaned his talents. As his letters demonstrate, he had wildly delusory notions that his play The Deer Park, an adaptation of his 1955 novel of the same name, rivaled in power and significance the best work of Tennessee Williams. Similarly, he thought his 1960s off-the-cuff and chaotic movies, Beyond the Law, Wild 90, and Maidstone were significant contributions to world cinema. Even worse, he actually believed his direction in 1987 of Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984)—adapted from what surely is one of the worst novels written by a major author—was superb, and that he had found a new calling. Although he brought the movie in under budget and a day ahead of schedule, he was never given the opportunity to direct another film.
He is a superb self-critic and also a sensitive critic of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Perhaps more than any other major writer but Eugene O’Neill, Mailer produced some of the best and the worst examples of American art. His letters are frank about his own uncertainly as to where he stood in the literary pantheon. On bad days, even a brilliant novel like An American Dream could seem like dreck to him. His letters are engaging because when it came to his main occupations—writing novels or thinking about the novels he was going to write—he was utterly honest with himself. All pretense falls away when Mailer goes to work on himself. He is a superb self-critic and also a sensitive critic of his predecessors and contemporaries. It is profitable to read what Mailer has to say about Hemingway, Faulkner, and many other writers. And he is generous with writers who seek his help, offering advice when it is asked for and reading the work of others—although he often has to beg off because of his own demanding writing schedule.
Astonishingly, Mailer seems to have answered nearly every letter ever written to him. J. Michael Lennon estimates that as a result Mailer issued something like forty-five thousand letters. I say “issued” because Mailer did not write all these letters—not exactly. He dictated many of them and then made edits and additions that his secretaries typed up. Although Mailer produced many perfunctory letters (only 2 percent of the total is represented in Lennon’s volume), Mailer’s exquisite courtesy is striking. Of course he had the resources, the help that made it possible to respond, but his sense of duty, his obvious belief that every letter had to be answered, is both admirable and moving. He wrote a letter to me that is not in this collection, and I still remember a vivid phrase he bestowed on me when he referred to all the books his friends had written and sent to him for his endorsement. These books were part of his “guilt impost pile,” he told me. Like his friends, I wanted him to endorse a book of mine. He never did, and I don’t know that he read my book. But that he responded at all and with such style impressed me. Consider that word “impost.” He was telling me he acknowledged a sense of obligation to me and to all his readers, friends or not. This is the mark of a gentleman, a title Mailer would not have abjured. He grew up reading about gentleman heroes and wanted to create his own, as well as to exemplify the creed of the gentleman. That he did not always live up to that creed—that indeed he could turn himself into a lout—only made the gentlemanly ideal all the more important as a standard he sought to uphold.
Mailer’s God was embattled, struggling against evil with no sure sense of victory.
As one of Mailer’s biographers, I found one huge revelation in this volume. I have always wondered why he found it so difficult to write in the third person. Except for The Naked and the Dead, which Mailer could invent with all the unselfconsciousness and brio of a tyro (although he was already a published author of a few important stories), he almost always turned to the first person, a voice that was for him somehow more authentic. Why? Even in his last novel, The Castle in the Forest, he could assume omniscience only by making his narrator a devil, one of Satan’s minions. Some would say this difficulty was due to Mailer’s overwhelming narcissism and self regard; that may be part of the reason, but his letters reveal, I believe, another reason, one connected with Mailer’s wrestling with theological questions. Together with Lennon, in 2007 Mailer produced a book of conversations titled On God. Even more than those conversations, Mailer’s letters reveal a man who could not believe in an omniscient, all powerful God, but rather a man who endorsed a supreme being that was less than complete—superhuman, but nonetheless human in the sense that Mailer’s God was embattled, struggling against evil with no sure sense of victory. If even God, in Mailer’s conception of existence, could not command it all, how could Mailer, a mere mortal, pretend to do so by employing the third person? His creative powers shriveled when he tried to impersonate an all-knowing narrator. The very enterprise of creating such a voice seemed sacrilegious.
It is no wonder then that Mailer so valued the gift of the Gilmore story, with its built-in plot, with Larry Schiller’s extensive and brilliant interviews with all the characters involved in the story of a man who demanded his own execution and who believed in karma and so many of the theological propositions that fired Mailer’s own imagination. For once, God had spoken to Norman Mailer, and consequently Mailer stripped himself of all his mannerisms and became the unalloyed conduit for what the Gilmore story had to say about America. The Executioner’s Song is the one book about which Mailer never seemed to have doubts—at least not after it was completed. He began it with many doubts, as his letters show, but he emerged from writing it a reborn writer. No other story would again quite engage him in the same way—although he came close, especially in the first part of Oswald’s Tale, set in the Soviet Union. Because Mailer once again had access to the kind of documentary evidence that fuels The Executioner’s Song, Oswald’s Tale has a substantiality that towers over all of Mailer’s other work. He was as much a biographer as a novelist, as posterity will perhaps one day acknowledge.
Mailer had other notable successes—especially his novels of the 1960s, An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), and one of the best books ever written about boxing, The Fight (1975)—but as he acknowledged, he never quite fulfilled his quest to write the great American novel, or any great novel. He wanted to be the American Tolstoy, but he never managed to meld his impressive analytical powers with his characters and plots. He ranked himself highly, but he never fooled himself into believing that he had realized his ambitions. When it came to the novel, he understood his shortcomings. But his efforts to excel in other arts as an actor, director, and playwright, while praiseworthy for a certain daring, also demeaned his talents. As his letters demonstrate, he had wildly delusory notions that his play The Deer Park, an adaptation of his 1955 novel of the same name, rivaled in power and significance the best work of Tennessee Williams. Similarly, he thought his 1960s off-the-cuff and chaotic movies, Beyond the Law, Wild 90, and Maidstone were significant contributions to world cinema. Even worse, he actually believed his direction in 1987 of Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984)—adapted from what surely is one of the worst novels written by a major author—was superb, and that he had found a new calling. Although he brought the movie in under budget and a day ahead of schedule, he was never given the opportunity to direct another film.
He is a superb self-critic and also a sensitive critic of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Perhaps more than any other major writer but Eugene O’Neill, Mailer produced some of the best and the worst examples of American art. His letters are frank about his own uncertainly as to where he stood in the literary pantheon. On bad days, even a brilliant novel like An American Dream could seem like dreck to him. His letters are engaging because when it came to his main occupations—writing novels or thinking about the novels he was going to write—he was utterly honest with himself. All pretense falls away when Mailer goes to work on himself. He is a superb self-critic and also a sensitive critic of his predecessors and contemporaries. It is profitable to read what Mailer has to say about Hemingway, Faulkner, and many other writers. And he is generous with writers who seek his help, offering advice when it is asked for and reading the work of others—although he often has to beg off because of his own demanding writing schedule.
Astonishingly, Mailer seems to have answered nearly every letter ever written to him. J. Michael Lennon estimates that as a result Mailer issued something like forty-five thousand letters. I say “issued” because Mailer did not write all these letters—not exactly. He dictated many of them and then made edits and additions that his secretaries typed up. Although Mailer produced many perfunctory letters (only 2 percent of the total is represented in Lennon’s volume), Mailer’s exquisite courtesy is striking. Of course he had the resources, the help that made it possible to respond, but his sense of duty, his obvious belief that every letter had to be answered, is both admirable and moving. He wrote a letter to me that is not in this collection, and I still remember a vivid phrase he bestowed on me when he referred to all the books his friends had written and sent to him for his endorsement. These books were part of his “guilt impost pile,” he told me. Like his friends, I wanted him to endorse a book of mine. He never did, and I don’t know that he read my book. But that he responded at all and with such style impressed me. Consider that word “impost.” He was telling me he acknowledged a sense of obligation to me and to all his readers, friends or not. This is the mark of a gentleman, a title Mailer would not have abjured. He grew up reading about gentleman heroes and wanted to create his own, as well as to exemplify the creed of the gentleman. That he did not always live up to that creed—that indeed he could turn himself into a lout—only made the gentlemanly ideal all the more important as a standard he sought to uphold.
Mailer’s God was embattled, struggling against evil with no sure sense of victory.
As one of Mailer’s biographers, I found one huge revelation in this volume. I have always wondered why he found it so difficult to write in the third person. Except for The Naked and the Dead, which Mailer could invent with all the unselfconsciousness and brio of a tyro (although he was already a published author of a few important stories), he almost always turned to the first person, a voice that was for him somehow more authentic. Why? Even in his last novel, The Castle in the Forest, he could assume omniscience only by making his narrator a devil, one of Satan’s minions. Some would say this difficulty was due to Mailer’s overwhelming narcissism and self regard; that may be part of the reason, but his letters reveal, I believe, another reason, one connected with Mailer’s wrestling with theological questions. Together with Lennon, in 2007 Mailer produced a book of conversations titled On God. Even more than those conversations, Mailer’s letters reveal a man who could not believe in an omniscient, all powerful God, but rather a man who endorsed a supreme being that was less than complete—superhuman, but nonetheless human in the sense that Mailer’s God was embattled, struggling against evil with no sure sense of victory. If even God, in Mailer’s conception of existence, could not command it all, how could Mailer, a mere mortal, pretend to do so by employing the third person? His creative powers shriveled when he tried to impersonate an all-knowing narrator. The very enterprise of creating such a voice seemed sacrilegious.
It is no wonder then that Mailer so valued the gift of the Gilmore story, with its built-in plot, with Larry Schiller’s extensive and brilliant interviews with all the characters involved in the story of a man who demanded his own execution and who believed in karma and so many of the theological propositions that fired Mailer’s own imagination. For once, God had spoken to Norman Mailer, and consequently Mailer stripped himself of all his mannerisms and became the unalloyed conduit for what the Gilmore story had to say about America. The Executioner’s Song is the one book about which Mailer never seemed to have doubts—at least not after it was completed. He began it with many doubts, as his letters show, but he emerged from writing it a reborn writer. No other story would again quite engage him in the same way—although he came close, especially in the first part of Oswald’s Tale, set in the Soviet Union. Because Mailer once again had access to the kind of documentary evidence that fuels The Executioner’s Song, Oswald’s Tale has a substantiality that towers over all of Mailer’s other work. He was as much a biographer as a novelist, as posterity will perhaps one day acknowledge.
April 2, 2015
Norman Mailer was a bigger-than-life personality with a pugnacious, chip-on-the-shoulder ego, as well as all the narcissism that's often found in talented, self-driven artists, and much more. I'm sure being his friend must have been very trying, and for many, this book will be too. It's huge—there are 700 letters included, some of them several pages long—and it's all Mailer, front and center. The reason you'll want to read it is that it provides an unparalleled look into the mind of a truly gifted writer as he swims some of the most volatile currents of our country's history, from the Pacific theater of World War II, through the Beat years, the '60s, the Nixon era, and beyond. Love him or hate him, it's hard to believe how much he got down on paper. Highly recommended for lovers of 20th century American history, of mid-century American literature, and of course, of Norman Mailer.
January 3, 2015
I won this book in a goodreads.com giveaway...thanks!
I read Norman Mailers Pulitzer Prize winning book "The Executioners Song" many years ago and I thoroughly enjoyed it. While I never read another book by Mailer, but intend to do so now, I was always intrigued by him. The book "Selected Letters of Norman Mailer" is an excellent read giving an inside look of this outstanding author, his life, adventures, books, experiences, and more. The book is organized by decades starting with 1940 thru 2007 and the people who corresponds with will knock your socks off. The editor of this book is J. Michael Lennon who does a superb job picking out the letters included in this book from over 45,000 that Mailer wrote. I recommend this book to any Norman Mailer fan and to anyone interested in reading about one of the best authors of our time. It's a book that will bring immense pleasure.
I read Norman Mailers Pulitzer Prize winning book "The Executioners Song" many years ago and I thoroughly enjoyed it. While I never read another book by Mailer, but intend to do so now, I was always intrigued by him. The book "Selected Letters of Norman Mailer" is an excellent read giving an inside look of this outstanding author, his life, adventures, books, experiences, and more. The book is organized by decades starting with 1940 thru 2007 and the people who corresponds with will knock your socks off. The editor of this book is J. Michael Lennon who does a superb job picking out the letters included in this book from over 45,000 that Mailer wrote. I recommend this book to any Norman Mailer fan and to anyone interested in reading about one of the best authors of our time. It's a book that will bring immense pleasure.
February 6, 2023
Amazing. The true gems of this book are the early letters Mailer writes from the Pacific Theater to his first wife Beatrice. Not only are they a gold mine of insight toward THE NAKED AND THE DEAD but also the A TRANSIT TO NARCISSUS.
Beyond that the whole collection travels chronologically as a sort of more than less than unreliable firsthand narration. But, as with all people, the further along the letters travel through history- and Mailer was a witness to History - the more the writer gives way to those he’s been addressing.
In this collection Mailer writes to Arthur Miller, Charles Rembar, Eiichi Yamanisshi (mentioning Akira Kurosawa), William Styron, (the) Editors of ONE, James Jones, Marlon Brando, James Baldwin, William Styron, Arthur Schlesinger, Mrs. John F. Kennedy, William Buckley Jr., (to the Editor of) PLAYBOY, Ethel Kennedy, Henry Miller, Truman Capote, Peter Bogdanovich, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Henry Kissinger, Larry King, Jack Henry Abbot, Gore Vidal, Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, (to) Bill Clinton, and Monica Lewinsky.
Beyond that the whole collection travels chronologically as a sort of more than less than unreliable firsthand narration. But, as with all people, the further along the letters travel through history- and Mailer was a witness to History - the more the writer gives way to those he’s been addressing.
In this collection Mailer writes to Arthur Miller, Charles Rembar, Eiichi Yamanisshi (mentioning Akira Kurosawa), William Styron, (the) Editors of ONE, James Jones, Marlon Brando, James Baldwin, William Styron, Arthur Schlesinger, Mrs. John F. Kennedy, William Buckley Jr., (to the Editor of) PLAYBOY, Ethel Kennedy, Henry Miller, Truman Capote, Peter Bogdanovich, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Henry Kissinger, Larry King, Jack Henry Abbot, Gore Vidal, Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, (to) Bill Clinton, and Monica Lewinsky.
March 20, 2020
this would be a massive waste of time for someone who wasn't a mailer completist, and for the mailer completist it feels somewhat inadequate because of some 45 thousand letters only 700+ are included, allowing large swaths of his life to be gone over without much analysis, especially the areas around armies of the night & Miami and the Siege of Chicago. this would have been better as a more complete multi volume set like they did with hunter thompson, which included the occasional response letter to give context. the interesting stuff here is mailer's early correspondence with his first wife before he became *Norman Mailer* and the letters between him and Diane Trilling, Lillian Hellman, James Jones, William Styron and other major writers of note. again, this is likely a waste of your time. but I'm down the hole so deep anyway.
June 21, 2019
This selection of letters — just a handful of all that Mailer wrote — gives great insight into the man behind “Norman Mailer.” Bawdy, thoughtful, manic, loving — there are many facets to Mailer’s work and personality displayed in his correspondence.
December 3, 2018
Reading this is a drug. Especially wonderful to see him move out of the 50s--his second and third novels were assassinated--and into the 60s, a decade which he owned and operated.
July 2, 2024
I found his letters from WW II fairly interesting since they shed light on Naked and The Dead. But as time goes on - and we're talking 60 years - Mailer got less engaging. Frankly, I find most of them dated and dull. However, the letters do show that Mailer wasn't the "Wild and crazy guy" he often portrayed in print and on TV. He was fairly intelligent and had good insight into his fellow novelists and writers.
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November 28, 2014Would Norman Mailer be considered counter-culture? Or are his political views mainstream? I came across a comment that he perceived the "hipsters" akin to "white negroes", a synergy of black culture with hip white culture out of apathy and nihilism of a post war 50s through the emerging phenomenon of jazz. Mailer christens the hipster as a psychopath.
March 20, 2015
If you feel well-disposed towards ol' Stormin' Norman, then these letters are not to be missed...
Here's my review: http://artsfuse.org/123001/fuse-book-...
September 20, 2015
Every page of this collection makes an ironclad case for reviving the lost art of letter writing. Mailer's correspondence with Gore Vidal is thrilling.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews