The Best Books to Start Reading Norman Mailer

Society member and scholar Robert J. Begiebing has written “The best books to start reading Norman Mailer” on Shepherd. Begiebing writes:

Mailer’s novels from the 1960s-2007 are notoriously challenging, and I’ve seen readers wanting to see what Mailer is about sometimes make the mistake of starting with one of his more difficult, convoluted novels—Ancient Evenings or Harlot’s Ghost, for example. But The Executioner’s Song is thought by many critics to be not only his best novel (winning his second Pulitzer Prize), but his most readable, despite its length. It recounts the story and ultimate execution in January of 1977 of Gary Gilmore, who murderedtwo men during his release from prison on parole. But what Mailer does is work outward from that basic fact to go beyond the media circus that surrounded the case and the execution to try to understand Gilmore, his girlfriend Nicole, and the whole American setting—particularly the American West—that defined their lives.

Thanks for the recommendations.

Begiebing’s Norman Mailer at 100: Conversations, Correlations, Confrontations is available for preorder now.