The New York Observer reported in November 2008 that Simon & Schuster would publish the biography of Norman Mailer being written by Mailer’s friend, longtime associate, and Society president J. Michael Lennon, paying, as its headline put it, over half a million dollars. Lennon had been working toward the book for years:
I have been collecting material for this biography almost from the beginning of our relationship. Beginning in 2003, Norman did a series of in-depth interviews with me on his life and work with the clear sense that the historical record had to be preserved. These interviews, along with others with his widow Norris and other family and friends will be essential to my effort.
A friendship
That relationship went back to 1971. Lennon, then a graduate student at the University of Illinois, saw Mailer’s famous Dick Cavett Show imbroglio with Gore Vidal and Janet Flanner and wrote to say he thought Vidal had maligned him unfairly; to his surprise, a long letter came back. The next year, teaching a seminar on Mailer, Lennon took his class to hear him speak on a book tour. “We met and had a great time, closed up the bar that night around 2 a.m.,” he recalled, and Mailer invited him to Provincetown the following summer. The friendship lasted until Mailer’s death and grew to include the books they wrote and edited together (Boston Globe, August 9, 2014). Was there ever a conflict between being Mailer’s biographer and his friend? “There’s supposed to be,” Lennon said. “But Mailer was open to criticism.”
A Double Life
The book appeared five years after the contract: Norman Mailer: A Double Life (Simon & Schuster, October 15, 2013), 947 pages, the authorized biography. It quotes extensively from Mailer’s unpublished letters and from Lennon’s interviews with Mailer, and draws on interviews with eighty-five others among his family, friends, and literary associates. Lennon dedicated it to Donna Pedro Lennon and Barbara Mailer Wasserman, and to the memory of Robert F. Lucid, a founding board member of the Society and, before Lennon, Mailer’s authorized biographer (Works and Days; 2003 conference program).
It arrived with Phillip Sipiora’s edition of Mailer’s essays, Mind of an Outlaw, and the New York Observer put both among its top ten books of the fall. In the New York Times Book Review, Graydon Carter called it “a glorious biography”. Reviews followed in the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Times, and the Observer, and in The Mailer Review, whose 2013 issue carried reviews by Barry H. Leeds, Michael K. Glenday, and Mark Olshaker and Sipiora’s conversation with Lennon on the writing of the book (Works and Days, bibliography 2013).
Lennon took the book on the road, to the University of South Florida that fall and, in August 2014, to The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, and the Provincetown Public Library (Mailer in the News, 2013 and 2014). His edition of the Selected Letters of Norman Mailer was due that December. In 2022 James Gray signed on to write and direct a drama series based on the biography.
In Works and Days
- J. Michael Lennon — Norman Mailer’s authorized biographer, archivist, and close friend; Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University and Chair of the Editorial Board of The Mailer…