No writer plunged more vigorously into the chaotic energies of the 1960s than Norman Mailer, fearlessly revolutionizing literary norms and genres to capture the decade’s political, social, and sexual explosions. Declaring himself to have “the mind of an outlaw,” he adhered closely to his own vision of what it meant to be a writer. In a way uniquely his own, he merged the public and the private, the personal and the political, taking risks with every sentence. This year, for the first time in a single volume, the Library of America is publishing four of his most extraordinary works.
At the American Writers Museum to discuss Mailer and his work will be J. Michael Lennon and Maureen Corrigan. Lennon is emeritus professor of English at Wilkes University, is Norman Mailer’s archivist, editor, and authorized biographer, and president of the Norman Mailer Society. His books include Norman Mailer: “A Double Life” (2013) and “Selected Letters of Norman Mailer” (2014).
In Works and Days
- “The Mind of an Outlaw” — Mailer’s watershed essay on the ordeal of writing and publishing The Deer Park — the Rinehart suppression and the agonized rewriting — published in Esquire just before…
- 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…
- Selected Letters of Norman Mailer — Edited by J. Michael Lennon: 714 letters, 1940–2007, selected from the roughly 50,000 Mailer wrote over his lifetime, with an introduction, ninety pages of notes, a…