Norman Mailer Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Norman Mailer

Since his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948, Norman Mailer has written some forty books, including novels, essays, political journalism, poetry, drama, and screenplays. References to his writing appear in discussions of the sexual revolution in twentieth-century writing, of writers who challenge the border between literature and politics, and of postwar countercultural movements. His most important achievement has been the bridging of the novelistic imagination and nonfictional writing in a movement known as the New Journalism, which includes writers such as Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Gay Talese. Few American writers have mixed fictional and nonfictional modes in such a range of ways.

Mailer's personal life, like his literary career, has been dramatic and various. Some critics complain that concern with the life of the author has eclipsed his actual artistic achievement. Mailer the personality became famous for such incidents as stabbing his second wife, Adele Morales, at a party; head-butting novelist Gore Vidal just before an appearance on Dick Cavett's television talk show in 1971; and championing the prison writer Jack Henry Abbott, who, soon after Mailer helped him get paroled, murdered waiter Richard Adan in 1981.

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