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The Mailer Files 3: Who Killed Marilyn?

By on November 26, 2008 in In the Media, Politics

Joe Stephens is back with his latest installment of the Mailer Files — the recently public paper trail of Hoover’s 15-year investigation of Norman Mailer — in The Washington Post. This week it’s “Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?” No, it wasn’t NM. Stephens quotes an FBI memo: “Mailer suggests that ‘right-wing’ FBI and CIA Agents had [...]

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Mailer Makes Another Esquire List

By on November 19, 2008 in Politics, Writing

Norman Mailer’s 1960 nonfiction narrative “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” made the “The 7 Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire Magazine” list. From the introduction: Five years ago, we named “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” by Gay Talese, the greatest story Esquire ever published. Here, as we close out our 75th anniversary celebration, are [...]

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“Obscene and Bitter,” Says FBI

“Obscene and Bitter,” Says FBI

By on November 19, 2008 in In the Media, Politics

Following on the coattails of the FBI’s fifteen-year investigation of Norman Mailer comes their literary critique of his work. With a follow-up story to their report on Hoover’s interest in Mailer, the Washington Post‘s Joe Stephens offers more insight into just what the FBI found out. This week, the FBI’s literary critic described Mailer’s Miami [...]

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The Mailer Files, Part 2

By on November 16, 2008 in In the Media, Politics

I blogged last week about the FBI’s fifteen-year investigation of Norman Mailer, and this morning, The Telegraph continues the story about the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover’s monitoring of Mr. Mailer. In 1962, Hoover called for a memo on Mailer: The FBI’s first Mailer memo, dated June 29 1962, contained enough incriminatory material to fuel [...]

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Voting with Mailer

By on November 13, 2008 in Norman Mailer, Politics

In an article in The Huffington Post, writer Dwayne Raymond remembers voting in the 2004 presidential election with Norman Mailer in Provincetown. In “On Voting with Norman Mailer,” Raymond remembers the respect that America and the his local community had for Mailer’s political acumen, even if they didn’t share his views: “Norman was loyal and [...]

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The Mailer Files

By on November 10, 2008 in In the Media, Norman Mailer, Politics

The Washington Post has an article today featuring J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI file on Norman Mailer. Apparently, Mailer wrote an article in Esquire that mocked Jacqueline Kennedy, making Hoover suspicious. The result was an on-going inimical relationship between the government agency and Mr. Mailer: Over the next 15 years, FBI agents closely tracked the grand [...]

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Mailer the Politician

By on November 13, 2007 in Politics

Dermot McEvoy of Publishers Weekly writes about Mailer the politician in his “A Different Remembrance: Norman Mailer, Politician” in a mini review of Joe Flaherty’s chronicle Managing Mailer: “It was the Mailer-Breslin ticket that thought up the idea of New York City as the 51st State—and turned the politics of the day on its head. [...]

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