Norman Mailer: Works and Days

About this project

Norman Mailer: Works and Days is a digital humanities project documenting the life and output of Norman Mailer (1923–2007). It is built around an interlinked bio-bibliography, with supporting entity pages, concept pages, full-text editions, and an annually updated bibliography of works by and about Mailer.

Lineages

This project descends from three scholarly lineages, each credited permanently in page-level frontmatter:

  1. The MediaWiki site at https://projectmailer.net/pm/Norman_Mailer:_Works_and_Days — an earlier web-native incarnation of this work.
  2. The print Works and Days compiled by J. Michael Lennon and Donna Pedro Lennon — original edition (2000) and revised edition (2018, which Jerry Lucas helped revise and edit). The Lennons themselves built on earlier compilations by Robert F. Lucid, Laura Adams, and Thomas Fiske.
  3. The annual bibliographies published in The Mailer Review since 2007, compiled by various scholars under the auspices of the Norman Mailer Society.

Scope and editorial policy

This project aims to chronicle every significant Mailer utterance in print in English, the chief events of his life, and a select secondary bibliography. Lennon and Lennon’s editorial policy remains the baseline: blurbs, jointly signed letters to the editor, brief quotations in gossip and chatter magazines, routine reprints, and subsequent editions beyond the first U.S. and U.K. editions are excluded.

The digital edition extends the print Works and Days in four directions:

  • Film, audio, and video. Mailer’s own films (Wild 90, Beyond the Law, Maidstone), interviews, readings, speeches, and television appearances, which Lennon excluded, are documented here.
  • Non-English translations. Translations of Mailer’s work are recorded in the bibliography register as their own entries, each with a language field and a translator credit, grouped to the original work. This follows the lead of The Mailer Review’s 2020 annual bibliography (decided 2026-06-18).
  • Post-2007 and post-2016 material. New publications of Mailer material (posthumous essays, letters, archival releases) and the continuing corpus of scholarship and reception are maintained on an ongoing basis.
  • Full texts and media. Rights-cleared full texts of Mailer’s writing are published alongside their Work pages, with book covers, portraits, ephemera, and scans embedded where they are germane.

Unpublished writings, sheet music, and published drawings remain deferred. See CLAUDE.md for the full editorial policy.

The annual bibliography

The Society’s bylaws commit it to producing an annual bibliography of works by and about Norman Mailer. The bibliography register is organized as one file per year, with stable YY.N legacy IDs where Lennon & Lennon’s print edition numbered the entry, and with compiler credit recorded in each year’s frontmatter. Git tags mark the state of the register at each annual release (bibliography-2024, bibliography-2025, etc.), so a specific year’s release remains citable even as the register continues to grow.

How to cite a page

Every page carries a stable ID that functions as a citation handle and a URL slug. For the Work page 1948-05-08-naked-and-the-dead, an MLA 9 citation is:

Lennon, J. Michael, and Donna Pedro Lennon. “The Naked and the Dead.” Norman Mailer: Works and Days, edited by Jerry Lucas, [site URL]/works/1948-05-08-naked-and-the-dead, last revised 2026-04-20. Accessed [date].

Where revision history matters for scholarly purposes, the revisions block on the page records every substantive change with date and reviser.

Legacy IDs from the Lennon & Lennon print edition (48.2, 87.2a, etc.) also resolve within the project — a reader encountering “48.2” in a footnote can search the site and land on the right page.

Norman Mailer: Works and Days is a non-commercial scholarly edition. It exists to document Mailer’s work and its reception, not to substitute for the published books and periodicals it describes. This is what the edition does with material that belongs to others, and what to do if we have got it wrong.

What the edition reproduces.

  • Bibliographic description and commentary (titles, dates, publishers, pagination, prices, plot and argument summaries, critical annotation). These are facts and the editors’ own prose, and they make up nearly all of the site.
  • Brief quotation. Work pages and annotations quote a sentence or a few words from Mailer and from his critics, attributed, to identify and characterize the item. We treat this as fair use for purposes of scholarship and criticism.
  • Full texts of Mailer’s own writing, only where the rights are cleared: under the grant made by the Estate of Norman Mailer to Project Mailer, which the editor has confirmed extends to this edition, or because the text is in the public domain. A cleared text is reproduced in full only when it is not otherwise available in print; a cleared text that remains in print (for example, an essay later collected in a book that is still sold) is shown as an opening excerpt with a note pointing the reader to the book. Texts whose rights are not yet settled show a short excerpt and say so. The build enforces this: nothing marked as pending can be published in full by accident.
  • Full texts by other authors (interviews, reviews, profiles) are held in the project’s working archive for scholarly use and are not published in full until the author and publisher have cleared them. Only an opening excerpt appears.
  • Images. Book jackets, magazine covers, and advertisements are reproduced at reduced size to identify the item described, which we treat as fair use. Photographs are reproduced only with the photographer’s or archive’s permission, or where they are in the public domain; the source and rights status of every image are recorded in the project’s media credits. Anything whose permission is pending is withheld from the public site.

If you hold rights in something published here. We want to know. If you believe the edition reproduces your work, or work you represent, beyond what fair use or an existing permission allows, contact the editor with the page address and a description of the material, and we will respond promptly: we will remove or reduce the material while the question is open, and we will correct the credit or the rights record where it is wrong. The same applies to errors of attribution: if a photograph, text, or annotation is credited wrongly, tell us and we will fix the record and log the correction.

Contact. Jerry Lucas, editor. Email: [email protected]. Post: c/o the Norman Mailer Society, https://normanmailersociety.org.

Contributors

Compiler history is tracked on each bibliography year file and on each page’s revisions list. Attribution is append-only: original authorship and revision history are never removed or rewritten.

Primary contributors include J. Michael Lennon, Donna Pedro Lennon, Jerry Lucas, and the successive annual bibliography compilers for The Mailer Review.

The Mailer Review

The Mailer Review is a double-issue annual published by the Norman Mailer Society and the University of South Florida since 2007. Its annual bibliography is a primary source for post-2016 entries in this project.

For the full editorial and technical policy, see CLAUDE.md.