Happy Birthday, Norman Mailer

Born January 31, 1923, Long Branch, NJ | Died November 10, 2007, New York, NY

Today is the 102^nd anniversary of Norman Mailer’s birth. One of the primary innovators of New Journalism, a style which incorporates the devices of literary fiction, Mailer won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Armies of the Night (1968). A controversial figure for many reasons, his contributions to nonfiction have played a significant role in shaping the genre.

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Norman Mailer, 1948, Carl van Vechten.

Norman Mailer, 2006, at the Norman Mailer Society Conference, Provincetown, photographer unknown.

“I find it’s more fun to write about something that you don’t know completely and that you will discover en route. […] if you start to write about things that you know half well, that you’re fascinated by, that you sense you have an appreciation of that others might not have, but you do have to acquire the knowledge as you go, you discover a great many things at the point of a pen. And it keeps the writing alive in itself.”

The Naked and the Dead (1948) was Mailer’s publishing debut, lauded as one of the best American wartime novels. The Armies of the Night (1968), a New Journalism nonfiction novel, earned Mailer a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The Executioner’s Song (1979), which also won a Pulitzer Prize, depicts Gary Gilmore’s execution as a “true-crime novel”.

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First published essay:

• “The White Negro,” Dissent Magazine, 1957.

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s (Library of America, 2018).

• Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s (Library of America, 2018).

Essays by Norman Mailer reprinted (R) in The Best American Essays (BAE), or listed in Notables (N):

• “The Best Move Lies Very Close to the Worst,” Esquire, 1993 (BAE 1994, N).

• “Fury, Fear, Philosophy: Understanding Mike Tyson,” Spin, 1988 (BAE 1989, N).

• “How the Wimp Won the War,” Vanity Fair, 1991 (BAE 1992, N).

See also:

Visit the Norman Mailer Society

Watch Mailer in conversation with Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling, in Town Bloody Hall, a documentary produced by Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, 1979

Listen to a conversation between J. Michael Lennon and Maureen Corrigan, American Writers Museum, 2018.

Listen to an interview with Studs Terkel, Studs Terkel Radio Archive, 1960.

Read “My Norman Mailer Problem—and Ours,” by Darryl Pinckney, The Nation, 2022.

Read “Norman Mailer, The Art of Fiction No. 193,” an interview with Andrew O’Hagan, The Paris Review, 2007.

Read “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy Norman Mailer,” James Baldwin, Esquire, 1961.