Norman Mailer

Mailer, Norman

(1923–  ) writer; born in Long Branch, N.J. He grew up in Brooklyn, excelled in the sciences in school, and majored in engineering at Harvard (B.S. 1943); but having written short stories and a novel before graduation, he was already committed to writing. He was drafted into the U.S. Army (1944–46) and volunteered for combat in the Pacific. After the war, he enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris (1947–49) to take advantage of the G.I. Bill while writing. He became an overnight sensation with his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), which at the time seemed rather shocking in its portrayal of men at war. His next two novels—Barbary Shore (1951) and Deer Park (1955)—pleased neither critics nor readers and he turned to expressing his increasingly more extremist social and political philosophy in magazine essays that were eventually collected in volumes such Advertisements for Myself (1959) and Cannibals and Christians (1966). After his novel The American Dream (1965) was generally dismissed as too outré for realistic Americans, he tended to concentrate on nonfiction works in which he impressed his own self onto public events or into others' lives—from the journey to the moon (Of a Fire on the Moon, 1970) to Marilyn Monroe's life (Marilyn, 1973). Meanwhile, his real-world doings and persona would often threaten to overwhelm his literary career; he seemed to be constantly engaged in verbal quarrels with such as Gore Vidal, in divorce proceedings with his various wives (one of whom he stabbed), or in contests to prove that he was the world's heavyweight champion of everything (actually engaging in boxing matches, running for mayor of New York City in 1960, and generally promoting himself as the heir of Ernest Hemingway). He also got distracted by becoming a producer, director, and actor in several bad movies. When he was at his best, however, as in the march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War, an event that led to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Armies of the Night (1968), he was still an inimitably potent voice. Although his later novels, such as Ancient Evenings (1984) and Harlot's Ghost (1991), seemed like bids for the Nobel Prize, many would agree that he deserved it anyway, for his total work represents a truly resonant and creative attempt to probe the mysteries of contemporary individuals and society.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

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.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.