Norman Mailer | Author

Norman Mailer
In Memoriam - American novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and film di

Featured Works

View all»

Previous Pause Next

PUBLISHED: Oct.16.2007

On God: An Uncommon Conversation

A towering figure in American literature, Norman Mailer has in recent years reached a new level of accessibility and power. His last novel, The Castle in the Forest, revealed fascinating ideas about faith and the nature of good and evil. Now Mailer offers his concept of the nature of God. His conversations with his friend and literary executor, Michael Lennon, show this writer at...

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Jan.23.2007

The Castle in the Forest

The Castle in the Forest is a 2007 novel by Norman Mailer. It is the story of Adolf Hitler's childhood as seen through the eyes of Dieter, a demon sent to put him on his destructive path. The novel explores the idea that Hitler had no Jewish heritage but was the product of incest.

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Jan.01.2007

Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

Mailer opines that Lee Harvey Oswald was a sincere Marxist, a nihilist and an inveterate liar who was motivated to assassinate John F. Kennedy in order to shake up the world, to create the conditions for a new kind of society superior to American capitalism or Soviet-style communism. Oswald, he suggests, was quite possibly the lone gunman, or at least may have thought he was—in...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Feb.01.2006

The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America

"Questions are posed," writes Norman Mailer, "in the hope they will open into richer insights, which in turn will bring forth sharper questions." In this series of conversations, John Buffalo Mailer, 27, poses a series of questions to his father, challenging the reflections and insights of the man who has dominated and defined much of American letters for the...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Dec.14.2005

Advertisement for Myself

An essential guide to the life and work of one of America’s most controversial writers, Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer’s essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the 1940s and 1950s, linked by anarchic and riotous autobiographical commentary. Laying bare the heart of a witty, belligerent and vigorous writer, this...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Feb.10.2004

The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

“Writing is spooky. There is no routine of an office to keep you going, only the blank page each morning, and you never know where your words are coming from, those divine words.” In The Spooky Art, Norman Mailer discusses with signature candor the rewards and trials of the writing life, and recommends the tools to navigate it.

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Oct.01.2003

Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings

An unexpected collection from Norman Mailer—a book of his selected poems and more than 100 of his drawings, most of them never before published. Modest Gifts is full of what the author calls “casual pleasures”—witty, naughty, and surprisingly tender verse and art. Lust, seduction, betrayal, jealousy, and even the banality of cocktail party chatter are depicted with humor, affection...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Apr.01.2003

Why Are We at War?

“Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Sep.01.2002

Tough Guys Don’t Dance

A dark, brilliant novel of astonishing pitch, set in Provincetown, a “spit of shrub and dune” captured here in the rawness and melancholy of the off-season, Tough Guys Don’t Dance is the story of Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer addicted to bourbon, cigarettes, and blonde, careless women with money." On the twenty-fourth morning after the decampment of his wife, Patty...

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Aug.05.2000

The Naked and the Dead

Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of World War II, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially doe the occasion by Norman Mailer. Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an army...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Aug.01.2000

Why Are We in Vietnam?

When Why Are We in Vietnam? was published in 1967, almost twenty years after The Naked and the Dead, the critical response was ecstatic. The novel fully confirmed Mailer’s stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Now, a new edition of this exceptional work serves as further affirmation of its timeless quality.

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Oct.26.1999

The Time of Our Time

Norman Mailer’s The Time of Our Time is a giant retrospective, a rich, boisterous portrait of our times seen through the fiction and reportage of one of America’s greatest writers. Mailer selected and edited the contents of this work to create an ongoing narrative of events large and small that have shaped America over the past 50 years. Included are passages from The Naked and the...

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Sep.01.1999

The Gospel According to the Son

Norman Mailer writes a novel about Jesus’ life. Is God speaking to me? Jesus asks. Or am I hearing voices? If the voices are from God, why has He chosen me as His son? And if they are not from God, then who gave me the power to perform these miracles? It soon becomes evident that we are being told the story of a skilled and most devout carpenter who is living with prodigious...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Jan.01.1999

An American Dream

Few modern American novels have ignited more controversy and contention than this story of Stephen Richards Rojack, war hero and congressman turned professor and television personality. From the moment Rojack murders his maddening wife and begins his desperate flight through the underground of the city and the soul, the reader is caught up in a tale of savage sexual and...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Oct.01.1997

The Deer Park

Desert D’Or is the fashionable California resort where Hollywood’s glittering elite converge when they need a break from city of celluloid dreams. It is an incestuous hothouse of a town—a haven for manipulators, film stars, lovers, pimps, producers, whores, gamblers, scriptwriters and cheats. Into this nightmare world of depravity arrives Sergius O’Shaughnessy, recently discharged...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Oct.01.1997

The Fight

The “fight” is the 1975 world heavyweight championship bout in Zaire between then reigning king of the ring Muhammad Ali and up-and-coming George Foreman. Mailer relays the events of the actual fight and includes the observations of George Plimpton, Hunter S. Thompson, and others.

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Sep.01.1997

Barbary Shore

Mike Lovett rents a room in a Brooklyn boarding house with the intention of writing a novel. Wounded during World War II, Lovett is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. But Lovett’s housemates have secrets of their own. As these mysterious figures vie for Lovett’s allegiance, Barbary Shore plays havoc with our certainties, combining Kafkaesque unease with...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Dec.01.1994

The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History

Following his arrest during the October 1967 anti-Vietnam march at the Pentagon, Mailer wrote of the anger, hippies, bewildered MPs and draft-card burners.

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Sep.06.1979

The Executioner's Song

Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning work scrutinizes the life and death of Gary Gilmore, who murdered two innocent men in Provo, Utah, in 1976. Gilmore was the first person executed in the United States following a ten-year moratorium on the death penalty which ended in 1977.

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

Norman's Latest Blogs

View all»

Jan.10.2008 - 5:01 pm

Norman Mailer Remembered: Tribute to an Icon

On Saturday, November 10th, 2007, the world lost a great writer and friend of Red Room: legendary writer and icon Norman Mailer. He was 84. A novelist, journalist, playwright,...

Published Reviews

View all»

Jan.21.2007

Published by The New York Times

This remarkable novel about the young Adolf Hitler, his family and their shifting circumstances, is Mailer’s most perfect apprehension of the absolutely alien. No wonder it is...

Audio & Video

View all»

Video: Charlie Rose Interview

Video: Norman Mailer Discusses the Iraq War

About Norman

Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist from Brooklyn, New York. A journalist, playwright, screenwriter and film director, Mailer had an extraordinary career as an innovator of creative nonfiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize...

Read full bio »

Norman MailerIn Memoriam - American novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and film di

Featured Works

Norman's Latest Blogs

Published Reviews

Audio & Video

About Norman

Norman Mailer
In Memoriam - American novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and film di