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

Written by
Constance E. Holmes
J. Michael Lennon

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Note: Much of the following has been incorporated into Norman Mailer: Works and Days.

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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.

1998

Primary

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

“Clinton for Pres. No, Not You, Bill: Hillary, Your Country Needs You.” The Observer (London), 8 February 1998, 1, 4. Essay (with editor’s title). Written in the wake of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, this 2500-word polemic underlines Mrs. Clinton’s desire for power~“vast and huge”! and criticizes her husband’s “failure to achieve greatness; and this not through a lack of talent but by inanition of character.”

“At the Point of My Pen.” In Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, edited by Will Blythe, 3–4. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. Mailer leads off this collection of essays by 26 writers, including Rick Bass, Robert Stone, Richard Ford, and Jayne Anne Phillips. He retells the story of what his mentor and friend Jean Malaquais told him about why he persisted in writing even though it was torture: “The only time I know the truth,” Malaquais said, “is when it reveals itself at the point of my pen.” Mailer says he has been “thinking about Malaquais’ answer for forty years” and finds it to be “incontestably true.”

Secondary

Kakutani, Michiko (8 May 1992). "Books of the Times: Self Portrait of an Artist with Customary Elan". The New York Times. Friday, Late Edition—Final, Section E; Part Two. p. 42.

Rosenshield, Gary (1998). "Crime and Redemption, Russian and American Style: Dostoevsky, Buckley, Mailer, Styron and Their Wards". Slavic and East European Journal. 42 (winter): 677–709.

Shanmugiah, S. (1998). "Norman Mailer and the Radical Hero: A Study of An American Dream". In Mutalik-Desai, A. A. Indian Views on American Literature. New Delhi: Prestige Books. pp. 36–43. 176 pp., unindexed.

Shapiro, James (10 May 1998). "Advertisements for Himself". The New York Times. Sunday, Late Edition, Section 7. p. 19.

Silver, Daniel J. (6 May 1998). "American Nightmare". The Wall Street Journal. Section A, Column 4. p. 20.

West, James, III (1998). William Styron: A Life. New York: Random House. 506 pp. Mailer’s relations with Styron and James Jones are discussed at length in Chapter 21, “Mailer and Others,” based in part on an interview with Mailer.

1999

Primary

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

“Milosevic and Clinton.” Washington Post, 24 May 1999, A25. In this 1500-word essay, Mailer criticizes the Clinton Administration’s bombing campaign in Kosovo and argues that the canny Milosevic duped Sec. of State Madeleine Albright. In support of his argument, he explores “the visceral difference between a combat devoted uniquely to bombing, and participation in a ground war.”

“Norman Mailer.” In For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love the Most, edited by Ronald B. Shwartz, 158–59. New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1999. Mailer lists the following, one through six: U.S.A., Studs Lonigan, Das Kapital, The Decline of the West, Anna Karenina, and Look Homeward, Angel. In a postscript, he notes that with the exception of Das Kapital, he had read all the others before the age of twenty.

“Norman Mailer’s Ten Favorite American Novels.” In A Passion for Books: A Book Lover’s Treasury, edited by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan, 222. New York: Times Books/Random House, 1999. Mailer makes no comment, but provides the following list, from one to ten: U.S.A., The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Look Homeward, Angel, The Grapes of Wrath, Studs Lonigan, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Appointment in Samarra, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Moby-Dick.

Interviews

“Postwar Paris: Chronicles of Literary Life.” Paris Review, no.150 (spring 1999): 266–312. Twenty-one individuals reflect on Paris after WWII in this evocative symposium, including Evan S. Connell, Kaylie Jones, Rick Bass, Mary Lee Settle, Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and James Dickey. The piece leads off with the comments of Mailer, poet Richard Wilbur, and Mailer’s authorized biographer, Robert F. Lucid, taken from a transcription of their conversation about Paris at an event honoring Lucid’s retirement from the University of Pennsylvania in September 1996. Mailer’s reminiscences deal with the mood of Paris in 1947, the writers he met there and the 1948 presidential election, in which Mailer supported Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate.

“A Conversation with Norman Mailer.” By J. Michael Lennon. New England Review 20 (summer 1999), 138–48. In mid-March 1998 in Provincetown, Mailer spoke of the genesis of The Time of Our Time and the relative merits of his fiction and nonfiction narratives, with briefer comments on early fame and the cold war. Excerpts reprinted in The Spooky Art (2003).

“Interview with Norman Mailer.” By Christopher Busa. Provincetown Arts 14 (summer 1999), 24–32. In a major interview by Mailer’s Provincetown neighbor and editor of this magazine, Mailer speaks longer and with more detail and nuance about what Provincetown has meant to him as an artist than anywhere else. It also includes a lengthy discussion of The Gospel According to the Son and Ancient Evenings.

“My Moment with Mailer.” Boston Phoenix, 3 September 1999, 28–30, 32. Article-interview by Chris Wright. Reprinted in Providence Phoenix, 10–16 September 1999. Contains an account of Mailer’s appearance at a symposium in Provincetown, and an earlier conversation with Wright. Wright’s introduction is padded, but Mailer provides some good insights on then and now in American life, aging and the clarity that comes with it, with asides on the corporation, politics, and plastics.

Secondary

Dearborn, Mary V. (1999). Mailer: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Includes useful bibliography. 478 pp. indexed (see 9 January 2000 Mailer letter below).

Kaplan, Fred (1999). Gore Vidal: A Biography. New York: Doubleday. 850 pp., indexed.

Podhoretz, Norman (1999). Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. New York: Free Press. 244 pp., indexed.

Poirier, Richard (1999). rying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 310 pp., indexed.

Updike, John (1999). "Stones into Bread". More Matter: Essays and Criticism. New York: Knopf. pp. 325–31. Review of The Gospel According to the Son.

Wallace, Christine (1999). Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew. New York: Faber and Faber. 333 pp., indexed. Greer appeared with Mailer in Donn Pennebaker’s 1972 documentary, Town Bloody Hall.

2000

Primary

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

“Just the Factoids.” Letter to the Editor. New York Times Book Review, 9 January 2000, 4. Mailer corrects three of the most egregious errors in Mary Dearborn’s biography in this column-and-a-half letter: 1) that he had never read the works of Karl Marx; 2) that he shunned his friend Buzz Farbar after he was imprisoned on a drug charge; 3) that he shared his home in Provincetown with Roy Cohn. He goes on to say that he did not read her biography, but gleaned these and several other errors from a review in Lingua Franca by Caleb Crain. Further, he states that the errors were “in some degree my fault since I did not choose to be interviewed, but I still wish that Mary Dearborn had tried to get at least two sources for each of her assertions.”

Letter to the Editor. New York Times, 22 March 2000. In this brief letter, Mailer comments on Sen. Robert Byrd’s 20 March Op-Ed piece in the Times, noting that “the United States and NATO stepped into the trap that Mr. Milosevic had set” when it began its 78-day bombing campaign.

Interviews

“One Helluva Guy.” Article-interview by Ginny Dougary. The Times 2 (U.K.), 2 June 2000, 3–7. Cover story. Well-written account of Dougary’s meeting with Mailer in Provincetown. Mailer was clearly comfortable with her, discussing his three-week stay in Bellevue in 1960, his marriage with Jeanne Campbell (and marriage generally), his affairs and diminishing libido. The piece is slugged on the cover of the magazine as “madness, women and every man’s terror,” a good summary.

“Still Stormin.” Article-interview by Alastair McKay. The Scotsman: S2 Weekend, 22 July 2000, 1–5. Cover story. Discussion in Provincetown of drugs, feminism, the corporation, and fame; no new ground broken, but some lively re-statements. Excerpts reprinted in The Spooky Art, 2003.

“God’s Foot Soldier.” Article-interview by David Aaronovitch. Independent on Sunday (U.K.), 20 August 2000, 4–5. Aaronovitch has difficulty understanding Mailer’s ideas of an existential God who is in danger of dying (or he feigns puzzlement well), but Mailer does re-state his theology quite clearly in this piece, based on a 14 August interview in Edinburgh where Mailer appeared at the International Book Festival.

“Norman Mailer Interview.” Article-interview by Romona Koval, presenter of the Australian program, Radio National’s Books and Writing. Based on an interview with Mailer at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. First broadcast on 1 September 2000. Internet printout is 12 pages in length. Many subjects are tackled in this omnibus interview, including the new journalism, first and third person points of view, feminism and the sexual revolution, the 2000 presidential election, boxing, Mailer’s engineering education, and what it means to be a left conservative. Excerpts reprinted in The Spooky Art, 2003.

Secondary

Amis, Martin (2000). "Mailer's Highs and Lows". The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000. London: Jonathan Cape. pp. 267–77. Reviews of The Essential Mailer (a British compilation of Existential Errands and The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer), Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Oswald’s Tale.

Athill, Diana (2000). Stet: An Editor’s Life. New York: Grove Press. 250 pp., unindexed. Athill was Mailer’s editor at his British publisher, Andre Deutsch, in the 1960s.

Hart, Henry (2000). The World as a Lie: James Dickey. New York: Picador. 811 pp., indexed.

Hartsock, John C. (2000). A History of American Literary Journalism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 294 pp., indexed.

Hume, Kathryn (February 2000). "Books of the Dead: Postmortem Politics in Novels by Mailer, Burroughs, Acker, and Pynchon". Modern Philology. 97: 417–44.

McCann, Sean (2000). "The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism". ELH. 67 (1, spring): 293–336.

Whalen-Bridge, John (December 2000). "Mailer: A Biography, and Norman Mailer: Works and Days". American Literature. 72 (4): 885–87. Review.

Wolfe, Tom (2000). "My Three Stooges". Hooking Up. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe’s rebuttal of negative reviews of his novel A Man in Full by Mailer, John Irving, and John Updike. Wolfe calls Mailer “an envious bag of bones” in this essay; Mailer later replied that, yes, he was a bag of bones, but if he was envious, it was not of Wolfe, but Tolstoy.