Norman Mailer

Mailer, Norman 

Born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, N. J. American author and essayist.

Mailer was educated as an engineer. During World War II he served in the navy in the Pacific. In The Naked and the Dead (1948; Russian translation, 1972), Mailer’s condemnation of militarism and fascistic elements in the US Army is combined with a naturalistic depiction of everyday life. In his later novels, Barbary Shore (1951), The Deer Park (1955), An American Dream (1965), and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), Freudian motifs become more apparent; satire on the American way of life is found next to existentialist views. In the 1960’s, Mailer was an active supporter of the movement against the war in Vietnam. His documentary reports The Armies of the Night (1968) and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968; Russian translation, 1971) brought him wide popularity.

WORKS

Advertisements for Myself. New York, 1959.
Of a Fire on the Moon. London, 1970.

REFERENCES

Istoriia amerikanskoi literatury, vol. 2. Moscow, 1971.
Geismar, M. American Moderns. New York, 1958.
Kaufmann, D. L. Norman Mailer. London-Amsterdam, 1969.
Poirier, R. Norman Mailer. New York, 1972.