Norman Kingsley Mailer (born 1923), American author, film producer and director, wrote one of the most noteworthy American novels about World War II. Only in his later political journalism did he reach that level of achievement again. Norman Mailer was b...

[This entry was updated by J. Michael Lennon (Wilkes University) from his update in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, volume 6, pp. 162-183, of the entries by Philip H. Bufithis (Shepherd College) in DLB 2: American Novelists Since W...

Norman Mailer's achievement lies primarily in his treatment of the conflict between man's search for self-actualization and the strictures society places upon him. Mailer has rendered this theme with an energy of style, an ideational power, and a vivid d...

I’m beginning to feel that Norman Mailer might have made a strategic mistake in recent interviews plugging his new book on writing, The Spooky Art. A strategic mistake in conspicuously low-balling his life’s work, his achievements as opposed to his once-grand expectations of himself. He...

Several years ago I wrote a snotty essay, “The Smiley Face at the End of the Tunnel,” which posited that very good but not great writers of secular disposition often produce an uncommonly “spiritual” novel at the end of their lives. It’s not that...

Norman Mailer, the pugnacious prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Executioner's Song," has died at the age of 84.Mailer died Saturday of acute renal failure...

Norman Mailer, the pugnacious prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Executioner's Song," has died at the age of 84.Mailer died Saturday of acute renal failure...