Mailer by the Decade: An Epistolary Slant
J. Michael Lennon's survey of Mailer's literary output decade by decade, from the Harvard stories of the 1940s to On God in 2007, given as a talk five months after Mailer's death while Lennon was finishing the Selected Letters. It counts forty major books, only eleven of them novels, and names three high peaks: The Naked and the Dead, The Armies of the Night, and The Executioner's Song.
J. Michael Lennon. “Mailer by the Decade: An Epistolary Slant.” Talk, Central Connecticut State University, 24 April 2008. J. Michael Lennon, 1 Apr. 2013, https://jmichaellennon.com/portfolio/mailer-by-the-decade/. Also published on Project Mailer as “Norman Mailer by the Decade: An Epistolary Slant,” https://projectmailer.net/pm/Norman_Mailer_by_the_Decade:_An_Epistolary_Slant.
A tour of Mailer’s career in six decades, given five months after his death, while Lennon was finishing the Selected Letters of Norman Mailer. Lennon proposes to punctuate each decade with “a characteristic letter,” and the subtitle comes from that plan; the text as posted carries the survey without the letters.
The argument is about range. Of the forty major books (see First Editions) only eleven are novels; the rest run from nonfiction narrative, the largest category and one Mailer partly invented, through plays, screenplays, poetry, biography, interviews, sports reportage, and criticism. The one form he refused was autobiography, which he thought would be a tombstone. Lennon tracks the crop rotation decade by decade: the Harvard apprenticeship and The Naked and the Dead, its slabs lifted from the letters home to Bea; the hard 1950s, in which Jean Malaquais’s tutelage became Barbary Shore and Advertisements for Myself became the watershed; the 1960s as “Norman Mailer’s decade,” crowned by The Armies of the Night; the third-person narratives that ended with The Fight; The Executioner’s Song as the third high peak; the 1990s as the biographical decade; and The Castle in the Forest, begun in Lennon’s own Provincetown study, and On God, the conversations Lennon taped with Mailer from 2003 to 2006.
Related pages
- 2008-04-24-lennon-mailer-by-the-decade | J. Michael Lennon | Why Mailer Matters | Selected Letters of Norman Mailer | First Editions | 2008