Norman Mailer Society/Mailer Centenary Projects List

Written by
J. Michael Lennon

(As of May 22, 2022)

Oxford University Press Mailer Bibliography (2022), compiled by Maggie McKinley.

The Naked and the Dead, 75th anniversary edition, includes three additional prefaces and 23 wartime letters to wife Beatrice and parents; edited by J. M. Lennon (Library of America, January 10, 2023). 800 pp. To commemorate the centennial of Norman Mailer’s birth and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of his blockbuster debut, The Naked and the Dead & Selected Letters 1945–1946 will include not only the novel itself but a selection of twenty-three letters (all but four from Mailer to his first wife, Beatrice) written during his wartime service and its immediate aftermath. The Naked and the Dead, nearly universally praised upon its publication in 1948 as an achievement inviting comparison with Tolstoy, is not just a monumental war novel but also a powerful antiwar novel that engages with the nature of power, the conflicts within a massive bureaucracy like the American military, and the imperialist and authoritarian urges present on the American side as the Cold War was about to emerge. It draws heavily and ambitiously on literary precedents such as Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy and Melville’s Moby-Dick. Its influence can be detected in near-contemporary novels such as From Here to Eternity and onward through Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and war novels by Tim O’Brien and Denis Johnson.

Norman Mailer in Context. 34 essays by different hands on all aspects of Mailer’s life and art, edited by Maggie McKinley, president of Mailer Society. 400 pp. with introduction, notes, index, and extensive bibliography (Cambridge University Press, 2021). This volume offers new insight into the breadth of contexts that inform Norman Mailer's body of work. It examines important literary, critical, theoretical, cultural, and historical frameworks for Mailer's writing, highlighting the ways his work reflects the concerns of twentieth and twenty-first century America. This book traces Mailer's literary influences; his contributions to a variety of literary genres; his participation in the American political sphere; the philosophical, religious, and gendered contexts that shape his work; and the iconic American figures he profiled. The book concludes with reflections on Mailer's literary and cultural legacy, emphasizing his advocacy for literary freedom and the contemporary resonance of his work.

Along Heroic Lines by Christopher Ricks. Contains long essay, “Norman Mailer: Just Off the Rhythm” (Oxford University Press, 2021). Christopher Ricks brings together new as well as substantially augmented critical essays across a wide range. Several derive from his term as the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, when his inaugural lecture engaged with the illuminatingly puzzled relations between poetry and prose. Comparison and analysis (the tools of the critic, as T.S. Eliot insisted) are enlivened by imaginative pairings: of Samuel Johnson with Samuel Beckett, of Norman Mailer with Dickens, of Shakespeare with George Herbert, or of secret-police surveillance in Ben Jonson's Rome with that of Carmen Bugan's Romania. Along Heroic Lines devotes itself to the heroic and to 'heroics' (Othello cross-examined by T.S. Eliot; Byron and role-playing; Ion Bugan, political protest and arrest). This knot is in tension with the English heroic line (Dryden's heroic triplets, Henry James's cadences, Geoffrey Hill's concluding book of prose-poems and how they choose to conclude). All alert to the balance and sustenance of alternate tones that prose and poetry can achieve in harmony.

Mailer TV series. James Gray, director (Ad Astra, The Two Lovers, etc.); based on Lennon’s 2013 biography (2023).

The Two Mailers, Off-Broadway play based in part on The Big Empty (2006), by John Buffalo and Norman Mailer. Ronald K. Fried, playwright; Julian Schlossberg, producer. Production delayed due to Covid.

Norris, play by Bonnie Culver, based on the memoir, A Ticket to the Circus (2010) by Norris Church Mailer. One-woman show, starring Anne Archer; directed by Michelle Danner. Streaming June 2022.