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The Executioner's Song Summary
Norman Mailer

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The Executioner's Song Summary & Study Guide
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The Executioner's Song Summary

Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song is many things, and its status between the realms of fiction and non-fiction makes it difficult to define. It is not non-fiction, notwithstanding the author's claim in his Afterword. The Pulitzer Prize Committee recognized Mailer's work as a "...thoroughly imagined work of fiction." This novel is not a work of non-fiction, but it is also not wholly a work of fiction. The book's form causes us to...

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Literary Precedents

Norman Mailer Biographies (9)

Norman Kingsley Mailer

1,164 words, approx. 4 pages

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 reac... Read more

Norman Kingsley Mailer

14,145 words, approx. 48 pages

Biography EssayNorman 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 t... Read more

Norman Mailer

3,481 words, approx. 12 pages

Since the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, catapulted Norman Mailer to sudden fame in the late 1940s, he has been alternately praised and criticized due to his outspoken opinion... Read more

Norman Mailer

9,101 words, approx. 31 pages

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 ... Read more

Norman Mailer

5,699 words, approx. 19 pages

In various newspaper columns, essays, interviews, and novels from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, Norman Mailer has brooded over the psychological and cultural implications of what he has termed the ... Read more

Norman Mailer

7,595 words, approx. 26 pages

Norman Mailer has labored for most of his literary career to repudiate what he himself describes as "the one personality he found absolutely insupportable--the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something... Read more

Norman Mailer

10,836 words, approx. 37 pages

After almost fifty years as a literary celebrity and a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Norman Mailer still defies critics and scholars to define his niche as a writer. Some interpreter... Read more

Norman Mailer

9,220 words, approx. 31 pages

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. Refer... Read more

Norman Mailer

18,011 words, approx. 61 pages

[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 (... Read more