79.14

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The Executioner’s Song. Boston: Little, Brown, 15 October; London: Hutchinson, 5 November. Nonfiction narrative on Gary Gilmore, 1056 pp., $16.95.

Dedication: “To Norris, to John Buffalo, and to Scott Meredith.” Discarded titles: Violence in America, The Saint and the Psychopath, American Virtue. Mailer’s title is taken from his poem of the same title published in 1964 (see 64.18), and then used as the title of chapter 15 of The Fight (75.12). In 80.1 Mailer explains this borrowing and also notes that the “old prison rhyme” that prefaces the book “is an old diddy [sic] from my movie Maidstone (71.28) which was just perfect for the book.”

Although scrupulously factual, the book is described on its jacket, and the cover of the later softcover edition, as a “true life novel.” Validating this subtitle, it won the Playboy Writing Award for fiction in 1979 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980. Mailer is the only writer to win Pulitzers for fiction and nonfiction, the latter for The Armies of the Night (68.8). The Executioner's Song was also nominated for the American Book Award for fiction (1980 as a hardcover, 1981 as a softcover) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1979.

Mailer, Philip Roth, William Styron and many other writers withdrew their books from the American Book Award competitions. See article by Michiko Kakutani, “Mailer, Styron and Roth Shun American Book Awards,” New York Times, 21 March, Sec. C, p. 28. In 1999, it was ranked number 72 on a list of the top 100 works of journalism of the twentieth century by 36 judges under the aegis of New York University’s journalism department. See “Journalism’s Greatest Hits: Two Lists of a Century’s Top Stories,” New York Times, 1 March 1999, Business Section, pp. 1, 13.

Mailer later wrote the screenplay for the film version of 79.14, which was nominated for an Emmy. The four-hour adaptation, staring Tommy Lee Jones and Eli Wallach, appeared on NBC-TV on 28 and 29 November 1982. Rpt: Three sections of the narrative appeared in a different form in Playboy (79.10, 79.19, 79.33). Excerpts from five chapters are reprinted in The Time of Our Time (98.7). See 68.8, 78.4, 1979 entries, 81.5, 82.22, 94.3, and 13.2, 503-22, 528-36.

Bibliography

Reviews

  • Bell, Pearl K. (February 1980). "Mailer: Settling for Less". Commentary. pp. 65–68. Negative.
  • Didion, Joan (October 7, 1979). "'I Want to Go Ahead and Do It'". New York Times Book Review. pp. 26–27. Retrieved 2018-12-04. Positive.
  • Johnson, Diane (December 6, 1979). "Death for Sale". New York Review of Books. pp. 3–6. Negative. Johnson apologized for several errors in her review in a letter to the NYRB, 21 February 1980.
  • Lodge, David (January 11, 1980). "From a View to a Death". Times Literary Supplement. pp. 27–28. Positive.
  • Lucid, Robert F. (October 21, 1979). "A Man Sought Death and, Too Late, Found It". Philadelphia Inquirer. §M p. 14. Positive.
  • McMurty, Larry (October 22, 1979). "Review of The Executioner's Song". New West. p. 82. Positive.
  • Morgan, Ted (November 19, 1979). "Fine Lines". Saturday Review. pp. 57–58. Positive.
  • Ricks, Christopher (March 6, 1980). "Mailer's Psychopath". London Review of Books. pp. 9–10. Positive. Rpt: Mailer Review (2008).
  • Rovit, Earl (November 20, 1979). "True Life Story". Nation. pp. 376–378. Positive.
  • Stern, Richard (January 1980). "Where Is That Self-Mocking Literary Imp?". Chicago. p. 108.
  • Wolcott, James (October 1, 1979). "Norman Mailer and the Dream of Death". Village Voice. pp. 46, 48. Mixed.

Essays

  • Comprone, Joseph (2013). "Genre and Dialogical Theory: Bakhtin and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song". Mailer Review. 7: 231–244.
  • Eggers, Dave (2012). "Introduction". The Executioner's Song. New York: Grand Central. pp. vii–xiii.
  • Edmundson, Mark (1990). "Romantic Self-Creations: Mailer and Gilmore in The Executioner's Song". Contemporary Literature. 31 (winter): 434–437. Rpt: Bloom (2003), Mailer Review (2015).
  • Frus, Phyllis (1994). The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. pp. 181–191. ISBN 9780521443241.
  • Kellman, Steven G. (1983). "Mailer's Strains of Fact". Southwest Review. 68 (spring): 126–133.
  • Lesser, Wendy (1993). "The Sleaze Factor". Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry into the Subject of Murder. Cambridge: Harvard UP. pp. 93–120. ISBN 9780674667365.
  • Merrill, Robert (1992). "The Executioner's Song: Mailer's Sad Comedy". Norman Mailer Revisited. Boston: Twayne. pp. 151–208. ISBN 9780805739671.
  • Scheffler, Judith A. (1983). "The Prisoner as Creator in The Executioner's Song". Midwest Quarterly. 4 (summer). Rpt: Bloom (1986).
  • Vince, Raymond (2014). "In the Deserts of the Heart: The Executioner's Song". Mailer Review. 8 (summer): 291–311.