The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer’s Best Sellers: Difference between revisions

On June 20, 1948, a Pacific war novel by a twenty-five year-old combat veteran from Brooklyn reached the number one position on the ''New York Times'' best-seller list. It remained on the list for sixty-two consecutive weeks, nineteen of them in the number one spot. After ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]'', Norman Mailer never again made the first position on the ''Times'' list. But ten more of his books — eight of them novels — over six decades made the list, including his last novel, ''[[The Castle in the Forest]]''. It reached number five on February 11, 2007, shortly after Mailer’s eighty-fourth birthday on January 31, and less than a year before his death on November 10.

No other major American writer of the post-war generation can boast of publishing best-selling novels over such a span of years, fifty-nine in Mailer’s case. Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal come closest. Bellow’s first best-seller was ''The Adventures of Augie March'' in 1953; his last was ''Ravelstein'', which made it for a week in May 2000, when Bellow was eighty-five. Vidal, born in 1925, had a chance to pass Mailer, but his last novel, ''The Golden Age'', appeared in 2000, and he died in 2012. His third novel, ''The City and the Pillar'', spent eight weeks on the ''Times'' list in 1947. His last best seller was ''Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal'', which spent two weeks on the list in 2002. Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth could surpass Mailer’s record, but have a way to go, and Roth has announced that he has given up writing. Their first best sellers appeared in 1973 and 1962, respectively.