Norman Mailer(1923-2007)
- Writer
- Actor
- Director
Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn-born and -bred writer who fought for what
he characterized as the "heavyweight championship" of American letters
after the 1961 death of
Ernest Hemingway, never came close to
his dream of writing the Great American novel, but he was a colossus of
American culture and literature in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. When he
died in 2007 at the age of 84, Mailer towered above all other American
writers of his and subsequent generations,according to his "New York
Times" obituary. A primal life force whose writing elucidated the human
condition among America and Americans better than any of his
contemporaries for better than three decades, Mailer likely will rank
with Herman Melville and Hemingway as
among the greatest writers produced by the United States. Although
denied the Nobel Prize that he had long coveted (winner of two Pulitzer
Prizes, Mailer believed that the near-fatal stabbing of his second-wife
Adele Morales by himself in 1960 attributed to his failure to win the
big prize), Mailer will be the writer that future generations go to to
understand the America of the late 1940s through at least the early
'80s. "Advertisements for Myself" (1959),
"An American Dream (1966)"
(1965), "The Armies of the Night" (1969) and "Executioners Song, The
(1980) (TV)_" -- one compendium of odds and ends interlaced with
Mailer's musings, one novel, and two books of "journalism" that he
classified as novels -- will be mandatory on the reading lists of
universities 100 years in the future.
Norman Mailer was born in January 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, to
Fanny (Schneider), who ran a nursing/housekeeping agency, and Isaac
Barnett Mailer, an accountant. His family was Jewish. Mailer entered
Harvard College in 1939 at the age of 16 to study engineering at a time
when there was still a quota on Jews at the Ivy League universities, to
keep them the province of the WASPs that still controlled the control
up to and through World War II. (Mailer would be a commentator on WASPs
and their loosening grip on America and American culture in the
post-World War II period. He saw the space project and the landing of a
man on the moon as the apotheosis of WASP culture.) He fell in love
with literature at Harvard, and began his first attempts at creative
writing. Mailer took his degree in 1943, was drafted into the Army the
following year and served briefly with a rifle company in the
Philippines. His experiences as an infantryman would be the genesis of
his 1948 novel "The Naked and The Dead", one of the first of the World
War II novels written by the men who had fought it.
Mailer would never have termed the generation that went to war in
1941-45 "The Greatest Generation", a concept alien to such post-war
writers as Mailer's erstwhile friend James Jones (author of "From Here
to Eternity", "Catch-22" author Joseph Heller, or populist American
historian Howard Zinn, all of whom
served in the War. The officers and enlisted men of Mailer's novel "The
Naked and the Dead" are not saints, nor are they on noble missions, let
alone quests for something as abstract as "democracy". Democracy is not
a staple of Norman Mailer's Army. The officers, as a class, represent
an insidious form of fascism -- in kind, if not degree -- in this war
against fascism. Published in 1948, "The Naked and The Dead" was a
bestseller and made its 25 year old author famous and relatively
well-off, financially. Mailer would never have to toil at any craft
other than writing for the rest of the nearly 60 years allotted to him.
His next two novels, "Barbary Shore" (1951) and "The Deer Park" (1954)
were artistic and commercial failures. For 10 years after the
publication of "The Deer Park" until "An American Dream" (serialized in
"Esquire Magazine" in 1964, rewritten and published as a novel in
1965), Mailer eschewed tackling another novel. Instead, he turned to
journalism and revolutionized what had been one of the ghettos of
American letters. If there had been no Norman Mailer, perhaps there
would have been a "New Journalism", but it would have been poorer as he
was its greatest exponent. "New Journalism" was a moniker hung on a
particularly personal type of reflection added to the pedantic Who,
What, Where & How? of traditional reporting. Rather than exile himself
from the story in the interest of an impossible-to-obtain "neutrality"
that is so dear to the mainstream American newspaper and magazine
culture currying favor with advertisers beyond the truss & body
building equipment slums of the old "Men's magazines", Mailer injected
himself into the story and wrote about how he was effected by events.
His seminal article about the 1960 Democratic National Convention in
Los Angeles, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (Superman being
John F. Kennedy and the Supermarket the
Los Angeles where the DNC was held, as well as the new post-War America
at large") might very well be considered as the starting point of the
New Journalism. The article was published in the November 1960 issue of
"Esquire Magazine." Tom Wolfe and
other masters of the "New Journalism," which stressed a kind of
irreverence towards the subject, soon followed.
In an American society that is still enthralled to Victorian-era
concepts of class (Virginia Woolf denounced authors who wrote for
money, a reflection of the aristocratic disdain for anyone who made
rather than inherited money as vulgarians whose seed was tainted by
contact with the till), Mailer's achievement was looked down upon.
Rather than being hailed for revolutionizing American letters, Mailer
was treated patronizingly by the Literary Establishment. Yet, the
serious literary novel now is as nearly dead as all the Cassandras of
the 1960s and '70s prognosticated, replaced by "non-fiction" memoirs,
in which writers no longer hide behind fictive personas to tell
stories, but take full-credit for living lives as full of foul
incidents as any novel ever published. (That many of these "true tales"
are fiction is beside the point.) Ironically, Norman Mailer, who longed
to write the Great American novel, likely must bear the lion's share of
responsibility for the death of the novel and the rise of the
confessional "non-fiction" book, as he elevated "mere journalism" into
an art form. Reporting became and art when Mailer married his beautiful
writing with naked confession that made him a world-class celebrity in
the 1960s and '70s, featured as a regular staple on television talk
shows. Simply put, without Norman Mailer, there would not be American
literature as we know it.
As concerns Hollywood, Mailer wrote a novel about Hollywood ("The Deer
Park") and the first "serious" biography of
Marilyn Monroe, which got him (and
Monroe) the cover of the July 16 1973 edition of "Time Magazine." He
made three improvisational films in the late 1960s:
Wild 90 (1968),
Beyond the Law (1968) and
Maidstone (1970) and directed the 1987
adaptation of his own neo-noir novel
Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987).
He despised the 1958 movie made from
The Naked and the Dead (1958),
but had better luck with
The Executioner's Song (1982)
(1979), for which he wrote the screenplay for the 1982 telefilm. In
1983, Mailer was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a
Limited Series or a Special for his work, three years after his 1979
"novel" (Mailer had characterized his "The Armies of the Night" as "The
novel as history, history as a novel") had won him his second Pulitzer
Prize, for Fiction. ("Armies" had conquered him his first, for General
Non-Fictionm in 1969.)
Norman Mailer died of acute renal failure at New York City's Sinai
Hospital on November 10, 2007. He was 84 years old.
he characterized as the "heavyweight championship" of American letters
after the 1961 death of
Ernest Hemingway, never came close to
his dream of writing the Great American novel, but he was a colossus of
American culture and literature in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. When he
died in 2007 at the age of 84, Mailer towered above all other American
writers of his and subsequent generations,according to his "New York
Times" obituary. A primal life force whose writing elucidated the human
condition among America and Americans better than any of his
contemporaries for better than three decades, Mailer likely will rank
with Herman Melville and Hemingway as
among the greatest writers produced by the United States. Although
denied the Nobel Prize that he had long coveted (winner of two Pulitzer
Prizes, Mailer believed that the near-fatal stabbing of his second-wife
Adele Morales by himself in 1960 attributed to his failure to win the
big prize), Mailer will be the writer that future generations go to to
understand the America of the late 1940s through at least the early
'80s. "Advertisements for Myself" (1959),
"An American Dream (1966)"
(1965), "The Armies of the Night" (1969) and "Executioners Song, The
(1980) (TV)_" -- one compendium of odds and ends interlaced with
Mailer's musings, one novel, and two books of "journalism" that he
classified as novels -- will be mandatory on the reading lists of
universities 100 years in the future.
Norman Mailer was born in January 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, to
Fanny (Schneider), who ran a nursing/housekeeping agency, and Isaac
Barnett Mailer, an accountant. His family was Jewish. Mailer entered
Harvard College in 1939 at the age of 16 to study engineering at a time
when there was still a quota on Jews at the Ivy League universities, to
keep them the province of the WASPs that still controlled the control
up to and through World War II. (Mailer would be a commentator on WASPs
and their loosening grip on America and American culture in the
post-World War II period. He saw the space project and the landing of a
man on the moon as the apotheosis of WASP culture.) He fell in love
with literature at Harvard, and began his first attempts at creative
writing. Mailer took his degree in 1943, was drafted into the Army the
following year and served briefly with a rifle company in the
Philippines. His experiences as an infantryman would be the genesis of
his 1948 novel "The Naked and The Dead", one of the first of the World
War II novels written by the men who had fought it.
Mailer would never have termed the generation that went to war in
1941-45 "The Greatest Generation", a concept alien to such post-war
writers as Mailer's erstwhile friend James Jones (author of "From Here
to Eternity", "Catch-22" author Joseph Heller, or populist American
historian Howard Zinn, all of whom
served in the War. The officers and enlisted men of Mailer's novel "The
Naked and the Dead" are not saints, nor are they on noble missions, let
alone quests for something as abstract as "democracy". Democracy is not
a staple of Norman Mailer's Army. The officers, as a class, represent
an insidious form of fascism -- in kind, if not degree -- in this war
against fascism. Published in 1948, "The Naked and The Dead" was a
bestseller and made its 25 year old author famous and relatively
well-off, financially. Mailer would never have to toil at any craft
other than writing for the rest of the nearly 60 years allotted to him.
His next two novels, "Barbary Shore" (1951) and "The Deer Park" (1954)
were artistic and commercial failures. For 10 years after the
publication of "The Deer Park" until "An American Dream" (serialized in
"Esquire Magazine" in 1964, rewritten and published as a novel in
1965), Mailer eschewed tackling another novel. Instead, he turned to
journalism and revolutionized what had been one of the ghettos of
American letters. If there had been no Norman Mailer, perhaps there
would have been a "New Journalism", but it would have been poorer as he
was its greatest exponent. "New Journalism" was a moniker hung on a
particularly personal type of reflection added to the pedantic Who,
What, Where & How? of traditional reporting. Rather than exile himself
from the story in the interest of an impossible-to-obtain "neutrality"
that is so dear to the mainstream American newspaper and magazine
culture currying favor with advertisers beyond the truss & body
building equipment slums of the old "Men's magazines", Mailer injected
himself into the story and wrote about how he was effected by events.
His seminal article about the 1960 Democratic National Convention in
Los Angeles, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (Superman being
John F. Kennedy and the Supermarket the
Los Angeles where the DNC was held, as well as the new post-War America
at large") might very well be considered as the starting point of the
New Journalism. The article was published in the November 1960 issue of
"Esquire Magazine." Tom Wolfe and
other masters of the "New Journalism," which stressed a kind of
irreverence towards the subject, soon followed.
In an American society that is still enthralled to Victorian-era
concepts of class (Virginia Woolf denounced authors who wrote for
money, a reflection of the aristocratic disdain for anyone who made
rather than inherited money as vulgarians whose seed was tainted by
contact with the till), Mailer's achievement was looked down upon.
Rather than being hailed for revolutionizing American letters, Mailer
was treated patronizingly by the Literary Establishment. Yet, the
serious literary novel now is as nearly dead as all the Cassandras of
the 1960s and '70s prognosticated, replaced by "non-fiction" memoirs,
in which writers no longer hide behind fictive personas to tell
stories, but take full-credit for living lives as full of foul
incidents as any novel ever published. (That many of these "true tales"
are fiction is beside the point.) Ironically, Norman Mailer, who longed
to write the Great American novel, likely must bear the lion's share of
responsibility for the death of the novel and the rise of the
confessional "non-fiction" book, as he elevated "mere journalism" into
an art form. Reporting became and art when Mailer married his beautiful
writing with naked confession that made him a world-class celebrity in
the 1960s and '70s, featured as a regular staple on television talk
shows. Simply put, without Norman Mailer, there would not be American
literature as we know it.
As concerns Hollywood, Mailer wrote a novel about Hollywood ("The Deer
Park") and the first "serious" biography of
Marilyn Monroe, which got him (and
Monroe) the cover of the July 16 1973 edition of "Time Magazine." He
made three improvisational films in the late 1960s:
Wild 90 (1968),
Beyond the Law (1968) and
Maidstone (1970) and directed the 1987
adaptation of his own neo-noir novel
Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987).
He despised the 1958 movie made from
The Naked and the Dead (1958),
but had better luck with
The Executioner's Song (1982)
(1979), for which he wrote the screenplay for the 1982 telefilm. In
1983, Mailer was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a
Limited Series or a Special for his work, three years after his 1979
"novel" (Mailer had characterized his "The Armies of the Night" as "The
novel as history, history as a novel") had won him his second Pulitzer
Prize, for Fiction. ("Armies" had conquered him his first, for General
Non-Fictionm in 1969.)
Norman Mailer died of acute renal failure at New York City's Sinai
Hospital on November 10, 2007. He was 84 years old.