“Above all, it’s a matter of staying strong no matter what happens.”
Often compared to (or perhaps contrasted with) Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song was a finalist for the National Book Award in addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1980. This extraordinary novel, which seems hellbent on defying simple explanation, features over 300 different characters and is almost 1,100 pages long. It tells the mostly true story of Gary Gilmore, notorious Utah murderer who insisted on being put to death by the state. Upon initial publication, The Executioner’s Song was widely regarded by Mailer’s critics and contemporaries as one of his signature masterpieces, and today’s critical consensus seems to agree, even if The Naked and The Dead often remains his chef d’oeuvre. Prior to winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1980, Mailer had already won a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The Armies of the Night (1968), a “nonfiction novel” which offers a detailed portrayal of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam War. The Armies of the Night also won Mailer a National Book Award and a George Polk Award for magazine reporting (since it was initially published in Harper’s). Winning two Pulitzer Prizes is an remarkable feat, but winning in two different categories is an even more notable accomplishment. To date, Mailer remains the only writer to have won Pulitzer Prizes in both the fiction and nonfiction categories (though other writers like Thornton Wilder won Pulitzer Prizes in the fiction and drama categories).
Dubbed a “true life novel,” The Executioner’s Song offers an exhaustive chronicle of the final nine months in the life of infamous American murderer Gary Gilmore. While Mailer makes several relatively minor embellishments in the novel, the bulk of the story is highly accurate to true historical events and it is told via numerous different perspectives from people who were there. Many of the interviews and letters collected to form this “true life novel,” which initially totaled 15,000 pages of documents all things considered, were gathered by Lawrence “Larry” Schiller, a photojournalist and film producer who managed to acquire the rights to Gary Gilmore’s life story (Schiller appears in The Executioner’s Song as a character himself in which he serves as what he called “a quiet voice from the other side of the hill”). Schiller was previously renowned for having conducted Jack Ruby’s deathbed interview, for his coverage of the Manson Family murders, and for spending time with Timothy Leary and other ‘60s counterculture figures. As a result of his knack for buying exclusive rights to true-crime stories, he came to be regarded as “a world-historical ambulance chaser,” or at least according to Time magazine. Larry Schiller had previously collaborated with Mailer as a silent partner on Marilyn: A Biography, a biography of Marilyn Monroe, as well as The Faith of Graffiti, an essay on graffiti as an art form in New York City. Schiller is still alive as of the time I am writing this review.
At any rate, meticulously researched and stylistically told in short declarative paragraphs via Schiller’s panoply of letters, journal entries, and interviews, The Executioner’s Song weaves together an intimate account of Gary Gilmore’s life leading up his notorious, senseless murders over two nights in July 1976, three months after a prior release from prison (a sentence for assault and armed robbery). One victim is a gas station attendant named Max Jensen (whom he leads into the bathroom and shot twice –“this one is for me” and “this one is for Nicole”) and the other is a hotel manager Ben Bushnell, whom Gary shoots for no particular reason. After killing these two men in separate situations, Gary simply steals a meager amount of petty cash and casually strolls away. Why would someone conduct these heinous acts of wanton killing? What could have possibly inspired these brazen murders? Mailer goes to great lengths to describe Gary’s background, including his lower-class upbringing, troubled familial relations, his resulting alcoholism, and so on. In fact, the novel conveys many of the vices that are rampant throughout the white lower-classes in America using Gary Gilmore as a case study –resentment, anger, racism, drug abuse, alcoholism, insecurity, weaponry, and so on. His story is both a tragedy and a cautionary tale.
Gary Gilmore’s world a darkly indulgent, often a-moral land which is seated among the rural communities at the edge of Salt Lake City in Utah, the modern American West (indeed Joan Didion published a fascinating review of The Executioner’s Song in The New York Times in 1979 which highlighted many of the Western themes in the novel). Against the backdrop of the ever-present Mormons, the plot of the novel truly begins as Gary as released from prison and he moves in with his Uncle Vern where he works in his shoe shop in Provo. Very quickly, however, Gilmore uncontrollably embarks on a pattern of lawless behavior –violating his parole, getting drunk, and causing trouble. One of the key moments in the early chapters of the novel is when Gary begins dating a young nineteen-year-old girl named Nicole, a twice-divorced mother of two who had previously been sexually abused, forced into an orgy, and sent away for a spell to the “nuthouse.” Their volatile, impassioned, and tumultuous romance is told in graphic detail, from constant sex and drugs to numerous haphazard affairs and desperate scrambles for money, as well as flashbacks to a string of abusive men, difficult situations in cheap hotel rooms, tents, and trailers, and even disturbing accounts of pedophilia and bestiality from past lovers. Suffice it to say, there is some truly vile stuff in this novel. Unsurprisingly, Gary, himself, turns violent toward Nicole and she eventually leaves him. When he cannot find Nicole, Gary grows angry, manic, and despondent. Her departure quickly serves as a chief trigger for Gary –a psychopathic and sociopathic individual– to start randomly murdering people, perhaps in search of some sort of self-gratification or personal satiation after the break-up. He drinks heavily and goes on long drives with April (Nicole’s young teenaged sister whose horrendous past is described as she was traumatically raped by three men in Hawaii while forcibly high on cocaine and LSD. I share these details to give but a small glimpse into the atrocious lives these people were made to endure). It is during one of these long drives with April that Gary suddenly begins killing with no warning and no remorse.
Nevertheless, throughout it all, we are reminded that Gary is an incredibly intelligent person with a knack for artistry. He is eventually arrested (thanks to his cousin Brenda giving him up to the police) and he is quickly convicted, all the while refusing any opportunity to appeal his conviction. Gary is adamant that he must pay for his crimes. Why did he do it? He simply shrugs his shoulders and says, “I can’t keep up with life” (305). Gary is then sentenced to death row –the first such death sentence in the United States in ten years following the brief period between the 1972 Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia which deemed capital punishment “cruel and unusual punishment,” and the 1976 Supreme Court decision in Gregg v. Georgia which reinstated the death penalty as constitutional. Rather than fighting his death sentence, Gary insists upon being executed, preferably by firing squad. The trial leads to a media spectacle as Gary repeatedly goads the Governor of Utah and the Utah Board of Pardons for being “moral cowards” and he bemoans the byzantine bureaucracy preventing his own execution. Gary expresses his contempt for the ACLU and other advocacy organizations, even as they attempt to save his life. Like many in his station in life, Gary is embittered toward wealthy elites and liberals who never previously cared about his life when he was struggling to survive, but who are now suddenly lining up to support him –they didn’t support him in life, yet they refuse to let him die. Somewhat like Holden Caulfield, Gary is jaded by all the phoniness he sees around him. All the while, Gary and Nicole fall back in love after he is safely held behind bars. They pen numerous flowery love letters to one another (many of which are faithfully and graphically copied into the text of the novel).
“You sentenced me to die. Unless it’s a joke or something, I want to go ahead and do it” (513).
“’I’m serious about wanting to end my life,’ said Gilmore. ‘The least justice can do is recognize that’” (771).
Gary and Nicole share a surprising and odd superstitious belief, one that undergirds their whole relationship. They both believe in karma and reincarnation –the idea that if you have behaved wrongly (like committing murder, for example) you will be reincarnated and forced to pay for what you’ve done in a past life. This offers a fascinating insight into Gary’s state of mind and his ultimate decision to die at the hands of the state. I also noticed several references to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest throughout the novel which appropriately recur and echo 1960s-era questions of recidivism and imprisonment.
In the heat of passion, Gary and Nicole make a pact to mutually commit suicide via an overdose of Seconal sleeping pills, however they both survive the attempt (Gary’s attempt seems to have been somewhat less serious) but Nicole is still locked away for it where she can receive psychiatric care. Then Gary goes on a hunger strike for being kept apart from Nicole and he makes a second suicide attempt using phenobarbital, but this too fails. From here, Gary and Nicole continue writing to one another until all of Gary’s avenues for survival are exhausted and he is finally sentenced to death. His wish to be executed by firing squad is granted, but he is denied the opportunity to face the guns without a blindfold (much of his family declines to attend the shooting, even his own mother Bessie skirts the chance to aid her son). The dramatic climax of the novel comes with the arrival of sunrise on the morning of January 17, 1977. Following detailed portraits of the various journalists in attendance, as well as a party held the night before in the jail, Gary makes a call into a public radio station, and even receives a phone call from Johnny Cash, before he is led out into the prison courtyard and strapped down to a chair with a bag placed over his head. Those in attendance describe a defiant Gary as he faces his end fearlessly. When asked if he has anything else he would like to say, Gary simply looks upward and utters, “Let’s do it” (a now-infamous line that inspired Nike’s popular “Just Do It” marketing slogan, a fact I was previously unaware of). And with that, after being administered his last rites, Gary is quickly shot to death by five men with rifles (four out of the five guns are loaded in order to protect the shooters from ever knowing who truly dealt the killing blow).
“Then the Warden said, ‘Do you have anything you’d like to say?’ and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, ‘Let’s do it.’ That was it. The most pronounced amount of courage, Vern decided, he’d ever seen, no quaver, no throatiness, right down the line. Gary had looked at Vern as he spoke
“The way Stanger heard it, it came out like Gary wanted to say something good and dignified and clever, but couldn’t think of anything profound. The drugs had left him too dead. Rather than say nothing, he did his best to say it very clear, ‘Let’s do it’
“That was about what you’d expect of a man who’d been up for more than twenty-four hours and had taken everything and now was hung over, and coming down, and looking older than Ron had ever seen him. Ah, he was drained out. Ron could see the deep lines in his face for the first time. Gilmore looked as white as the day the lawyers first met him after the suicide attempt” (1016).
While reading The Executioner’s Song, I found myself drawn to Mailer’s uniquely terse, declarative, impressionistic paragraphs, but honestly it takes incredible commitment and diligence to finish this novel. At nearly 1,100 pages long, The Executioner’s Song is the lengthiest of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels (as of 2024), and needless to say, this doorstop of a book gets fairly tedious and unbearably dark at points.
The novel continues on after the death of Gary. His ashes are spread in several parts of Utah, and we learn how his death has impacted the lives of others around him. For example, the lingering memory of Gary continues to haunt the dreams of April (the younger sister of Nicole who was waiting for Gary in the car while he committed his first murder). Now that he is gone, she often awakens in terror, believing that Gary is still out there in the night killing people. Meanwhile, Nicole is transported out to Malibu to get away from the press and sit for extensive interviews with Larry Schiller before eventually moving to the San Fernando Valley and attempting to live a normal life. Gradually, she rids herself of Gary’s presence by having sex again (against Gary’s final request that she forever remain faithful to him). First, she sleeps with a hitchhiker and then gradually with other men. At least she seems to end the novel in a slightly better place. Perhaps there is some hope for her after this extraordinary ordeal. But upon finishing this book, I still wondered whatever happened to Nicole? Did she ever sit down for another interview? Did she ever read The Executioner’s Song? Did she watch the television film? The last update I was able to find on her was an interview she gave to a radio station in 1987 in which she continued to blame herself for Gary’s murder spree, claiming that if she had only stayed with him and not fled, none of this would have ever happened. It’s disheartening to know that even ten years after the death of Gary, she was still blaming herself. By that point, she had remarried and was living on a farm in Oregon. She went by the name Nicole Barrett Henry (formerly Nicole Barrett Baker). Unsurprisingly she became a born-again Christian, as was en vogue in the ’80s, but at that time, she said very little about Schiller, Mailer, or this novel. If she is still living out there somewhere, hopefully she has found some measure of peace.
Apparently, Norman Mailer later stated in an interview after the publication of The Executioner’s Song, that he had initially written this book in order to show that Gilmore was serious about his intention to die. Indeed, the novel gives a provocative glimpse into the deplorable, vulgar, atomized conditions of the American under-classes and the myriad problems within the judicial system. Mailer neither condemns nor exalts a figure like Gary Gilmore, but rather he simply offers him up for consideration, warts and all. Was it right for the United States to execute Gary Gilmore? This question seems to scream forth from the pages, even though it is never explicitly asked in The Executioner’s Song. Those sympathetic to Gary Gilmore might blame his criminal behavior on a chaotic, violent upbringing (particularly his troubled relationship with his father), while others might retort that Gary Gilmore nevertheless the committed heinous murders and should face the full brunt of the law regardless of how he was raised. For some people, all life is of intrinsic value; for others, “justice as vengeance” has its merits. Capital punishment continues to spark controversy in the United States, albeit far less so than in decades past as we have gradually grown more accustomed to the seemingly inexorable slide of extreme demagogic right-wing politics which has lamentably bid farewell to any semblance of serious, reasonable policy discourse. As of the time of this writing, twenty-seven states have outlawed the death penalty, joining the vast majority of countries around the world that have also outlawed the death penalty, but that still leaves roughly half the states which still permit it (even if inmates tend to wait decades on death row while their cases are tied up in legal filings). However, when considering a case like Gary Gilmore’s, is anybody really shedding a tear at his demise? What is the state supposed to do with a violent, suicidal sociopath who insists on being put to death? At the time he was executed, a poll found that Americans overwhelmingly favored his execution by a margin of 71-29. And since Gary’s death, the American public seems to be slightly in favor of the death penalty, and in the ensuing decades, the U.S. government has put to death over 1,000 people.
Even after the publication of The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer seemed to have a sympathetic ear for incarcerated people. Among the many controversies he sparked in his lifetime, in 1980 Mailer aided convicted killer Jack Abbott in his successful bid for parole. In 1977, Abbott had read about Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and he wrote to Mailer, offering insight into his life behind bars. In response, Mailer helped him to publish In the Belly of the Beast, a book about life in the prison system which consisted of Abbott’s letters to Mailer. It became a darling in left-of-center circles in America. However, once paroled (which came at Mailer’s assistance), Abbott used his newfound freedom to immediately commit a careless act of murder in New York City, stabbing a 22-year-old waiter named Richard Adan to death. Naturally, the blowback for Mailer was severe, with many wondering how he could have been so blinkered by an avowed murderer. Later, in a 1992 interview with the Buffalo News, Mailer conceded that his involvement in this situation was “another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in.”
At any rate, with The Executioner’s Song being a “true life novel” which straddles the line between fiction and history, one wonders to what extent The Executioner’s Song even qualifies for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? Especially since very little in this novel is actually fiction. If Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, a “nonfiction novel” about the anti-Vietnam War protest, could win a Pulitzer for Nonfiction, why couldn’t The Executioner’s Song? What is the fundamental difference between these two novels? What makes The Executioner’s Song a work of fiction but The Armies of the Night a work of nonfiction? Mailer later confessed that he added some “extrapolation” in The Executioner’s Song to his editor Ned Bradford at Little, Brown and Company, though the veracity of the novel has never really faced the same level of scrutiny as other works of historical fiction. According to Mailer’s biographer J. Michael Lennon, Mailer deliberately marketed The Executioner’s Song in an effort to boost his chances of winning another Pulitzer Prize (this time in the fiction category). Perhaps it was just another work of historical fiction that leaned more heavily toward history than fiction. Mailer later expounded upon this distinction between fiction and nonfiction in The New York Times: “Nonfiction provides answers and fiction illumines questions. I think my book does the latter.”
It was Mailer’s partner Larry Schiller who eventually directed the television film based on The Executioner’s Song, which starred Tommy Lee Jones in the role of Gary Gilmore and Christine Lahti as Nicole. Shortly before Mailer’s death in 2007, he and Larry Schiller sat down again for a unique interview to discuss Mailer’s legacy (also see an interview Schiller did in The Mailer Review entitled “The Untold Story Behind The Executioner’s Song: A Conversation with Lawrence Schiller” with Jeffrey Severs, associate professor at the University of British Columbia). Since then, Schiller has made many efforts to keep Mailer’s literary inheritance ever-present, founding the Norman Mailer Awards and organizing the Norman Mailer Writers Colony.
On a final note, the title for The Executioner’s Song may have been derived from “The Lord High Executioner’s Song” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. But Mailer later wrote a poem entitled “The Executioner’s Song,” which was published in Fuck You magazine in 1964, and he used the title again as a chapter header in his 1975 nonfiction book entitled The Fight.
“Deep in my dungeon
I welcome you here
Deep in my dungeon
I worship your fear
Deep in my dungeon
I dwell
I do not know
if I wish you well.”
–old prison rhyme
Notable Quotations:
“In the mountains, the snow was iron gray and purple in the hollows, and glowed like gold on every slope that faced the sun. The clouds over the mountains were lifting with the light. Brenda took a good look into his eyes and felt full of sadness again. His eyes had the expression of rabbits she had flushed, scared-rabbit was the common expression, but she had looked into those eyes of scared rabbits and they were calm and tender and kind of curious. They did not know what would happen next” (17).
“Brenda was accustomed to men taking quite a while to say anything to each other, but if you were impatient it could drive you crazy” (21).
“Then she became really scared of what she might be getting into. In fact, her heart was so high, she could have been breathing some strange gas making her half faint, half exhilarated. She had never felt anything so strong as this before. It was as if it would be impossible to let this guy go” (81, Nicole on chasing after Gary).
“He said, ‘Hey, there’s a place in the darkness. You know what I mean?’ He said, ‘I think I met you there. I knew you there.’ He looked at her and smiled and said, ‘I wonder if Sterling knows about that place? Should we tell him?’ They both looked at Sterling, and he was sitting there with a, well, just a funny kind of smile on his face, like he knew it was coming down that way. Then Gary said, ‘He knows. You can tell. You can see in his eyes that he knows.’ Nicole laughed with delight. It was funny. This guy looked twice her age, yet there was something naïve about him. He sounded smart, but he was so young inside” (82-83).
“Gary hit her. It was the first time, and he hit her hard. She didn’t feel the pain so much as the shock and then the disappointment. It always ended the same way. They hit you when they felt like it” (158, on the first time Gary becomes violent against Nicole).
“’Nobody is ever really free, Gary. As long as you live with another human being you’re not free’” (212, says Gary’s cousin Brenda).
“In her mind, she kept seeing that man looking her square in the face from the other side of the counter. She had an ice-cold feeling in her heart. That man was after her” (260).
“Hosts of feelings poured forth. No, Boaz had not become involved with them. That was against his client’s wishes. His client had this peculiar mélange of right-wing ideas and left-wing emotions. Gary hated blacks, for instance, but that, Boaz explained, was because they were a dangerous majority in prison. All the white prisoners were in danger of being raped by blacks. Gary also hated the ACLU. That was because they preached freedom of the individual but wouldn’t give Gilmore the liberty to choose his death” (630).
“Bang! Bang!
A Real live shoot ‘em up!
Mrs. Bessie Gilmore of Mitaukie, Ore cordially invites you to the execution of her son: Gary Mark Gilmore, 36
Place: Utah State Prison, Draper, Utah
Time: Sunrise
Earplugs and bullets will be furnished” (688). – a satirical invitation Gary drafted in a letter
“In about 30 hrs. I will be dead.
That’s what they call it –death. Its just a release –a change of form
I hope I’ve done it all right” (915, one of Gary’s final letters to Nicole).
On the 1980 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1980 Fiction Jury consisted of the following three members:
- Chair: Frank D. McConnell (1942-1999) was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame summa cum laude in 1964, then went on to Yale University where he received his M.A. in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1968 with a dissertation on Wordsworth’s The Prelude under the direction of Harold Bloom. He taught English at Cornell University (1967-1971), and Northwestern University (1971-1981). He joined the English faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 1982 where he would teach for 16 years. He published several books including The Confessional Imagination: A Reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude, The Spoken Seen: Film and the Romantic Imagination, Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth and Pynchon, Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature, and The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells. After arriving in California, McConnell published a series of detective novels about a nun who inherits her father’s investigative agency (Murder Among Friends, Blood Lake, The Front King, and Liar’s Poker). He wrote a regular humorous column in the Catholic journal Commonweal. Upon his death in 1999, the University of California wrote an In Memoriam: “With Frank McConnell’s death on 17 January 1999, the UCSB Department of English lost its most popular undergraduate teacher. With lectures at once passionate and irreverent, often ribald, he held classes of five to seven hundred students spellbound on subjects as diverse as science fiction and Shakespeare. His colleagues knew him as prodigiously wide in his learning–as well as brilliantly witty, always ready with a comic story of sharp quip.” He was a Guggenheim fellow, a Fulbright professor in Germany, and served on several Pulitzer Prize for Fiction juries (twice as chair). He was married twice, divorced once, and was survived by two sons when he died in 1999.
- Anatole Broyard (1920-1990) was born into a black Louisiana Creole family but for most of his life, he kept his racial identity a secret, always “passing” as white and preferring to be known simply as a “writer” rather than a “black writer.” Broyard’s racial identity has been the subject of considerable discussion including by the likes of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who penned a New Yorker article entitled “White Like Me” about it. During World War II, Broyard enlisted in the army (which was then racially segregated) but he was enlisted as a white man. He later studied at the New School for Social Research under the GI Bill. He became closely linked to the Greenwich Village arts scene. He taught creative writing at The New School, New York University, and Columbia University. For many years, Broyard was an essayist, editor, and daily book reviewer for The New York Times (1971-1986). He contributed articles and short stories to The Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, and other magazines. His first marriage produced a child but ended in divorce. He remarried years later when he was forty years old and had two more children (he raised them both in suburban Connecticut as racially white). He was the author of two books Aroused by Books, which had a selection of his book reviews, and Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes, a collection of essays. He died of prostate cancer at the age of 70 at the Dana-Farber Institute in Boston, Massachusetts.
- Walter Clemons (1930-1994) was a celebrated book critic for Newsweek in the 1970s and 1980s. He was born in Houston, studied at Princeton, and received a master’s degree from Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Clemons worked for Newsweek from 1971-82 and again from 1983-88. In those years, he was an editor, a book critic, and a senior writer, and he also occasionally wrote ballet reviews. He wrote a number of cover stories, most of them about authors, including Joyce Carol Oates, Saul Bellow and John Cheever. After 1988, he continued to write reviews for the magazine from time to time. He also wrote criticism for The New York Times, where he was an editor of The Book Review from 1968-71, and other publications. He died at the age of 64 in 1994 due to complications relating to diabetes. He was survived by his brother and left behind an unfinished biography of Gore Vidal. His only published book during his lifetime was The Poison Tree, a collection of short stories.
According to the jury report (submitted by chair Frank McConnell in December 1979 to Professor Richard Baker at Columbia), the three novels that were highly regarded by the jury were The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth, The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and Birdy by William Wharton. Walter Clemons could not decide between Roth’s The Ghost Writer or Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Anatole Broyard praised Roth’s The Ghost Writer, but he expressed some concerns that Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song might not technically qualify as a novel (“whatever that means”) noting that it might raise “unpleasant controversy and embarrass the Pulitzer Committee.” Frank McConnell thought Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song was decidedly the best work of fiction published in 1979 and he also warmly endorsed Roth’s The Ghost Writer. In the end, the prize was given to Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. This was the first year the Pulitzer Prizes started publishing the finalists, as well.
Notably, Norman Mailer had previously won a Pulitzer for General Nonfiction ten years earlier in 1969 for his book Armies of the Night, which was about the anti-war March on the Pentagon. 1969 was a rare year in which there were two winners, the other winner being So Human An Animal by Rene Jules Dubos.
Lastly, from what I can tell, Anatole Broyard is one of the first racially diverse individuals to serve on a Pulitzer Fiction Jury (he was born into a black Louisiana Creole family, but he lived all his life passing as a white man).
Who is Norman Mailer?
Norman Kingsley, or in Hebrew “Nachem Malek,” Mailer (1923-2007) was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a South African émigré and his mother doted on young Norman, often calling him “perfect.” He graduated from Boys High School in 1939 and entered Harvard that fall, just as the German army marched into Poland. Harvard classmates remembered Mailer as “brash and jug-eared and full of big talk about his sexual experience,” though, in fact, he had had very little sexual experience by that point. Mailer then received his S.B. degree (with honors) in engineering in 1943, and was drafted in early 1944 where he served as a rifleman in the South Pacific during World War II and wrote his magnum opus The Naked and the Dead (1948) based on his experience. he was sent off to the Philippines and worked as a cook during the war in Japan (a single patrol he made on the island of Leyte, became the inspiration for The Naked and the Dead). The novel owed a tremendous debt to John Dos Passos, Leo Tolstoy, and James T. Farrell.
His subsequent novels included Barbary Shore (1951), a novel of the Cold War and the struggle between capitalism and socialism (it received mostly poor reviews), and The Deer Park (1955), a fictionalized account of Elia Kazan’s troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1959, he published Advertisements of Myself, a showcase of all his previous work and his ambitious plans for the future, which uses his personality as the volume’s armature. Its huge influence on a generation also seeking to achieve creativity and self-realization gave Mailer a new audience and set the stage for the sixties, Mailer’s happiest, most tumultuous, and productive years. He published 17 books between 1962 and 1972, including five books nominated for the National Book Award in four different categories. The Armies of the Night (1968) a non-fiction narrative of the anti-Vietnam War March on the Pentagon, won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and a Polk Award. He then published Of A Fire On The Moon (1971), a careful study of the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing, and The Prisoner of Sex (1971), a critical response to the women’s liberation movement. The pace of his writing slowed in the mid-seventies as he worked on his novel set in the Egypt of three thousand years ago, Ancient Evenings, which appeared after a decade of work in 1983. He later regarded this as his best book. Of course, he won a second Pulitzer Prize for his critically acclaimed 1979 best-seller The Executioner’s Song, a 1,000-plus-page “true life novel.” While many critics regarded it as a masterpiece, Mailer expressed mixed feelings since it wasn’t entirely his project (since Larry Schiller compiled all the relevant interviews and documentation). In the nineties Mailer published the best-selling Harlot’s Ghost, a 1,300-plus-page CIA novel, nonfiction narratives on Pablo Picasso and Lee Harvey Oswald, and The Gospel According to the Son, a first-person retelling of the four gospels. He closed the decade out with a massive retrospective of his entire career, The Time Of Our Time (1998), in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Mailer. He then published The Castle in the Forest (2007), a novel about Hitler which is narrated by the devil. Despite his health beginning to fail, Mailer remained staggeringly productive.
Mailer had written screenplays in Hollywood and published a total of 39 books (including 11 novels), as well as plays, poems, and every type of narrative form imaginable. A key figure in the “new journalism” movement (which brought novelistic writing devices to nonfiction narratives), Mailer’s columns, essays, and political reporting in Esquire were essential reads, in which he reported on numerous political conventions, participated in various symposia and campus debates, boxed in public venues, and was known to never shy away from a fight. He was regarded as a braggadocious, chauvinistic man with many passions and feuds. Fans of The Dick Cavett Show will remember his infamous (and apparently drunken) appearance opposite one of his great literary foes, Gore Vidal.
Mailer gave advice to several president and made an unsuccessful bid for mayor of New York, himself, running as a secessionist candidate (hoping to make New York City the 51st state). served as president of the American chapter of the writer’s organization, P.E.N., for which he garnered controversy yet again in 1984 when he invited George P. Schultz, then secretary of state, to address the opening session of the conference “The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State.” Mailer simply dismissed the protestors as “puritanical leftists.” Throughout his career, Mailer won most of the major literary awards, except for the Nobel Prize. Later in 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. He was a co-founder of The Village Voice (where he developed his signature brand of bold, acerbic, hipster existentialism with a poetic and metaphysical style) and was published in over 75 different magazines and journals. Perhaps his most infamous essay was ‘The White Negro” in 1957. Among several movies he made, Mailer’s most famous film was Maidstone during the filming of which he bit off part of an ear of the actor Rip Torn after Torn attacked him with a hammer.
He was married six times and had a total of nine children. His first marriage was to Bea Silverman when he served in World War II. His second marriage was to abstract painter Adele Morales (a frequenter artist’s hangouts and former lover of author Jack Kerouac and Edwin Fancher, who later founded The Village Voice with Mailer and Dan Wolf). By all accounts it was a stormy, alcoholic relationship (both parties engaged in affairs) which hit its low point in 1960 when Mailer threw a party to launch his improbable bid for mayor of New York, and after a night of heavy drinking (in which beat poet Allen Ginsberg got into a fight with editor Norman Podhoretz), Mailer, wearing a ruffled matador suit, repeatedly argued with his guests before confronting his wife in a drunken, incoherent rage. In her memoir, Adele recalled having taunted her husband, bluntly derided his manhood, and made ugly reference to his mistress. Some guests recalled that the point of no return came when she told her husband that he was not as good as Dostoyevsky. He stabbed and seriously wounded her (stabbing her in the stomach and back with a penknife, puncturing her cardiac sac). Mailer spent some time in Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric observation and pled guilty to third-degree assault. The couple divorced the following year. Mailer then married Carol Stevens, whom he married and divorced within a couple of days in 1980 to grant legitimacy to their daughter, Maggie. He then married Lady Jeanne Campbell, granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, and then Beverly Rentz Bentley, before settling on former model Norris Church, with whom he remained married until his death.
In his 2007 New York Times obituary, they described Mailer as a “combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation… Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky… He was also the least shy and risk-averse of writers. He eagerly sought public attention, and publicity inevitably followed him on the few occasions when he tried to avoid it. His big ears, barrel chest, striking blue eyes and helmet of seemingly electrified hair — jet black at first and ultimately snow white — made him instantly recognizable, a celebrity long before most authors were lured out into the limelight.”
He was an activist and anti-war protestor, yet he was a fierce opponent of women’s liberation and feminism. In a famous 1971 debate with Germaine Greer at Town Hall in Manhattan he declared himself an “enemy of birth control.” He spent his life trying to write the “big one” –or the Great American Novel.
He died at the age of 84 due to renal failure in 2007. He was survived by all nine of his children. To this day, Mailer’s legacy as a novelist, speaker, filmmaker and pop culture icon continues to live on, with all of his many achievements and controversies. Much of my brief biography above has been cobbled together from various sources, including Mailer’s New York Times obituary, various news articles, and information provided by J. Michael Lennon, Mailer’s official biographer.
Shortly before his death in 2007, Norman Mailer gave an interview to Andrew O’Hagan for the Paris Review at his home on Cape Cod (Mailer was also previously interviewed for the Paris Review in 1964). As a lifelong admirer of the legendary Paris Review interviews, I recommend devouring these.
Film Adaptations:
- The Executioner’s Song (1982)
- Director: Lawrence Schiller
- Starring: Tommy Lee Jones and Christine Lahti
Further Reading:
- The Naked and the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer.
- An American Dream (1965) by Norman Mailer.
- Why Are We In Vietnam? (1967) by Norman Mailer.
- The Armies of the Night (1968) by Norman Mailer, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award.
- The Fight (1975) by Norman Mailer.
- Harlot’s Ghost (1991) by Norman Mailer.
- Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013), an official biography by J. Michael Lennon.
Literary Context 1979-1980
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1979): Odysseas Elytis, a Greek poet “for his poetry, which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear-sightedness modern man’s struggle for freedom and creativeness.”
- National Book Award Winner (1980): Sophie’s Choice by William Styron (hardcover) and The World According to Garp by John Irving (paperback).
- Booker Prize Winner (1979): Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1979 was The Matarese Circle by Robert Ludlum. Other bestselling novels published this year included Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut, The Dead Zone by Stephen King, The Third World War: August 1985 by John Hackett, Smiley’s People by John le Carré.
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams was published.
- Kindred by Octavia Butler was published.
- If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino was published.
- A Planet Called Treason by Orson Scott Card was published.
- Miss Marple’s Final Cases and Two Other Stories by Agatha Christie was published.
- The Neverending Story (Die unendliche Geschichte) by Michael Ende was published.
- Suttree by Cormac McCarthy was published.
- Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami was published.
- The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
Reminiscent of other Pulitzer Prize-winning novels which blended the literary genres of history and fiction –such as William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner or Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels—Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song is an extraordinary achievement. An often bombastic, iconoclastic figure in American letters, it only seems fitting that Norman Mailer would earn his place among the Pulitzer Prize-winners (for both fiction as well as nonfiction). However, as the longest Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to date (nearly 1,100 pages long), The Executioner’s Song is an incredibly daunting, tedious read. I like to think of myself as an unusually diligent reader but even I have my limits, especially when reading such a dark, morally bleak “true life novel.” Is Norman Mailer rightly regarded as one of America’s true literary lights? Or was he a mere provocateur? Either way, if it were up to me, while I appreciated the chance to read my first Norman Mailer novel (which consequently exposed me to a unique historical moment I had yet to learn about), I would have likely taken a closer look at Suttree by Cormac McCarthy for the Pulitzer Prize this year.
Mailer, Norman. The Executioner’s Song. Grand Central Publishing. New York, NY, 2012 with a foreword by Dave Eggers (originally published in 1979). Among the many dedications, Mailer includes his editor for ten years Larned G. Bradford of Little Brown who passed away in 1979.