The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/Norman Mailer: Supplemental Bibliography Through 2006

Written by
Constance E. Holmes
J. Michael Lennon

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URL: . . .

This checklist picks up where Norman Mailer: Works and Days (Shavertown, PA: Sligo Press 2000) by J. Michael and Donna Pedro Lennon left off at the end of 1998. It consists of chronologically listed entries of significant works by and about Mailer that have appeared from that time through 2006. In addition, entries for a number of items that appeared from 1980–1998, items unknown or unavailable to the Lennons at the time their bio-bibliography was published, have been added. This checklist is, therefore, a supplement to Works and Days, although it cannot claim to be comprehensive. Many brief interviews, joint letters to the editor, ephemera, and Mailer quotations of uncertain authenticity in the popular press and Internet have been passed over; others have certainly been missed. Doubtless some significant secondary works have not been located. Entries for these and for the continuing stream of narratives, essays, interviews, poems, letters to the editor, and drawings by Mailer will eventually be gathered, it is hoped, into a successor volume to Works and Days. Annotations have been provided for all items by Mailer, but not for most secondary items. Apology is made to those whose essays or monographs about and interviews with Mr. Mailer have escaped attention.

1982

Secondary

Beidler, Philip D. (1982). American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 220 pp., indexed.

1986

Secondary

Chevigny, Bell Gail (1986). "Twice Told Tales and the Meaning of History: Testimonial Novels by Miguel Barnet and Norman Mailer". Centennial Review. 30 (2): 181–95.

Mierau, Maurice A. (1986). "Carnival and Jeremiad: Mailer's The Armies of the Night". Canadian Review of American Studies. 17 (fall): 317–26.

1988

Primary

Interviews

“Norman Mailer: The Tough Guy Is Really a Cuddly Jewish Teddy Bear.” Profile-interview by Pearl Sheffy Gefen. Lifestyles (International Edition) 92 (1988), 60, 62–64. During a visit to Toronto to launch his film, “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” Mailer is interviewed by this Jewish cultural magazine, headquartered in Ottawa. He speaks about the film, but also makes extended comments on his Jewishness.” He says, “Being Jewish is a whole inner way of life, and the Holocaust took away any possibility of telling myself I wasn’t Jewish.”

Secondary

Mottram, Eric (1988). "Norman Mailer: Frontline Reporter of the Divine Economy". In Lee, Robert A. First Person Singular: Studies in American Autobiography. New York: St. Martin’s. pp. 217–43.

1989

Primary

Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor

Introduction to Messages: New and Selected Poems, 1969–1989, by Luke Breit, 5–8. Fort Bragg, CA: Q. E. D. Press, 1989. Soft cover. Mailer praises Breit (the son of the late Harvey Breit) for being “one of the best romantic poets we’ve got” and for giving him a lift. “Luke Breit is Doctor Breit, Traffic Consultant for locked-up synapses and fucked-up grace.”

Secondary

Kenny, James Michael (1989). Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and the Problem of the Non-fiction Novel (Doctoral Dissertation). University of Alabama.

Miller, Gabriel (1989). "A Small Trumpet of Defiance: Politics and the Buried Life in Norman Mailer's Early Fiction". In Sorkoin, Adam J. Politics and the Muse: Studies in the Politics of Recent American Literature. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press. pp. 79–92. Reprinted in Bloom, 2003.

Olster, Stacey (1989). "Norman Mailer after Forty Years". Michigan Quarterly Review. 28 (3): 400–16.

Schleifer, Ronald (1989). "American Violence: Dreiser, Mailer, and the Nature of Intertextuality". In Con Davis, Robert; O’Donnell, Patrick. Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 121–43.

1990

Secondary

Edmundson, Mark (1990). "Romantic Self-Creations: Mailer and Gilmore in The Executioner's Song". Contemporary Literature. 31 (winter): 434–47. Reprinted in Bloom, 2003.

1991

Primary

Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor

Foreword to Presences: Photographs of Heaton Hall, by Beverly Anoux Pabst. Torino, Italy, Stamperia Artistica Nazionale, 1991. Soft cover, no pagination. In his evocative three-page foreword, Mailer calls Pabst’s 45 photographs of this empty (and later razed) resort hotel in the Berkshires “the spookiest book of photographs I have seen,” and “one of the more eloquent.” He also makes the claim that “in searching for the occult, a photograph can be of more use than a painting.”

Secondary

Oriard, Michael (1991). Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. 579 pp., indexed.

1992

Primary

Interviews

“Waiting for Mailer’s Big One.” Article-interview by Gregory Feeley. Million: The Magazine about Popular Fiction (U.K.), no. 7 (January–February 1992), 38–42. The focus of Feeley’s comments and questions in this important piece is the many novels Mailer planned but did not write, including the “big novel” about death he worked on in the late 1950s, the sequels to Ancient Evenings, the biker novel he started in 1966 and an autobiographical novel which had its origins, Mailer says, in “the saga of the Mailer family back in Russia with my grandfather as I imagined him.” He abandoned it after reading the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

“Norman Mailer: The Hubris of the American Vision.” Interview by Eric James Schroeder. In Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, edited by Eric James Schroeder, 90–105. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992. One of 11 interviews in this collection, including those with Michael Herr, Robert Stone, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tim O’Brien, and Larry Heinemann. Contains extended discussion of the Vietnam War, WWII, and three of Mailer’s books: The Naked and the Dead, Why Are We in Vietnam?, and The Armies of the Night. Mailer also discusses with some prescience the small wars of the future. Excerpts reprinted in The Spooky Art, 2003, (see above).

Secondary

Algeo, Ann M. (1992). The Courtroom as Forum: Homicide Trials by Dreiser, Wright, Capote and Mailer (Ph.D.). LeHigh University. (Truman Capote, In Cold Blood; Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy; Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song; Richard Wright, Native Son.

Novak, Odysseas (1992). "He megale peripolia tou Norman Mailer (Norman Mailer's long watch)". Diavazo. 286: 26–9.

O’Donnell, Patrick (1992). "Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Literature". Boundary. 2, 19: 181–204.

O’Donnell, Patrick (1992). "The Voice of Paranoia: Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song". Prospectus. 17: 459–73.

1993

Secondary

Krassner, Paul (1993). Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture. New York: Simon and Schuster. 352 pp., indexed. Krassner, editor of The Realist, published several pieces by Mailer in the 1950s and 1960s.

Lesser, Wendy (1993). Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry into the Subject of Murder. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 270 pp., unindexed.

Stull, James N. (1993). "The Armies of the Night: Norman Mailer's Performing Self". Literary Selves: Autobiography and Contemporary American Nonfiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. pp. 101–17.

1994

Secondary

Frus, Phyllis (1994). The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative: The Timely and the Timeless. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. 292 pp., indexed.

Mylan, Sheryl A. (1994). "Love in the Trenches: Images of Women in Mailer's The Naked and the Dead". War, Literature and the Arts. 6 (spring–summer): 75–85.

Smith, Kathy (1994). "Norman Mailer and the Radical Text". In Colatrella, Colatrella; Alkana, Joseph. Cohesion and Dis- sent in America. Albany: State University of New York Press. pp. 187–89. 252 pp., unindexed. Reprinted in Bloom, 2003.

1995

Primary

Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor

“Tolstoy and Chekov.” Paris Review 137 (winter 1995), 48–49. Mailer recounts a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a conversation between the two great Russian writers.

Interviews

“Norman Mailer: Taking Stock and Taking Aim.” Article-interview by Divina Infusino. American Way 28 (15 June 1995), 54–57, 82–83, 87. Most of this interview deals with the recently published Oswald’s Tale, but Mailer also discusses television, family, marijuana use, and his films.

Secondary

Mellard, James M. (1995). "Origins, Language, and the Constitution of Reality: Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings". In Siegel, Ben. Traditions, Voices, and Dreams: The American Novel Since the 1960s. Newark: University of Delaware Press. pp. 131–49.

1996

Secondary

Arlett, Robert (1996). "A Physician Half-Blind: Implosion and Public Address in Why Are We in Vietnam?". Epic Voices: Inner and Global Impulse in the Contemporary American and British Novel. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press. pp. 67–109. 192 pp., indexed.

1997

Primary

Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor

“Friendly Legend: Tributes to Ginsberg.” Rolling Stone, 29 May 1997, 40–43. Along with William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Gregory Corso, Patti Smith, Yoko Ono and several others, Mailer offers a brief valedictory comment on the late poet, lauding his courage at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

Interviews

“A Minority of One: An Interview with Norman Mailer.” By Christopher Hitchens. New Left Review, no.22 (March/April 1997), 115–28. Wide-ranging and thoughtful probing of Mailer’s political commitments and how they have evolved in the face of assassinations, the end of the cold war, and the growing power of corporations. Mailer’s relations with his mentor, Jean Malaquais, and his views of Presidents Reagan and Clinton are also considered.

“A Conversation with Norman Mailer and Dr. Christopher M. Leighton.” Undated, but obviously from the period just after the publication of Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son on May 02, 1997. In this transcribed telephone interview, Leighton, a theologian, presses Mailer on his motives for writing the narrative and what effects his retelling will have on Jews and Christians. Along the way, Mailer reveals a good deal about his own Jewishness, including his Jewish and Yiddish language study and his reading of Graetz’s five-volume history of the Jews. Important interview.

Secondary

Clindinnen, Inga (1997). "Norman Mailer Meets Jack Ruby". Heat. Vol. 7. pp. 49–55.

Friedrich, Otto (1997). City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. 497 pp., indexed.

Guest, David (1997). "Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song: Strategies of Defiance". Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. 1997. 179 pp., indexed.

Neilson, Heather (October 1997). "Jack's Ghost: Reappearances of John F. Kennedy in the Work of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer". American Studies International. 35: 223–41.

Pops, Martin (1997). "Mailer's Picasso: Portrait and Self-Portrait". Salmagundi. 116 (fall–winter): 141–59.