Days

The life chronology, 1923–2026, one page per year

Before 1923 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s

Before 1923

pre-1923: Mailer's four grandparents are born in Lithuania between 1858 and 1870 and emigrate in the 1890s — the Schneiders to the United States, the Mailers to South Africa and subsequently to England. Mailer's parents, both born in Lithuania in 1891, arrive in the U.S. as infant (Fan, 1894) and young adult (Barney, 1919) respectively, and marry in Manhattan on 12 February 1922.

1920s

1923: Norman Kingsley Mailer (Hebrew name Nachum Melech) is born on 31 January in Long Branch, New Jersey, to Isaac Barnett "Barney" Mailer and Fanny "Fan" Schneider Mailer. The family lives with Fan's parents in Long Branch, first on Morris Avenue and then in "Kingsley Court" — a cluster of three large beach cottages owned by the Schneiders at Beach and Ocean Avenues, named for the newborn.
1924: No recorded events. Norman, not yet two, lives with his parents and maternal grandparents in Long Branch, New Jersey.
1925: No recorded Lennon events. Norman is two years old; family remains in Long Branch, New Jersey. A childhood portrait survives from the year.
1926: Mailer's paternal grandfather, Benjamin Mailer, dies in South Africa on 25 May. Norman is three; the family remains in Long Branch.
1927: Mailer's sister, Barbara Jane Mailer, is born on 6 April. Norman, four years old, gains the sibling who will remain his closest lifelong relative and, later, his secretary.
1928: Both of Mailer's maternal grandparents die within six months — Ida Schneider in May, Rabbi Chaim Jehuda Schneider in November — and the family leaves the Long Branch household they had shared with them. In the fall the Mailers move to Cortelyou Road in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, continuing to summer in Long Branch. Norman enters P.S. 181, Flatbush, where he will complete grades one through four.
1929: No recorded Lennon events. Norman, six, completes his second year at P.S. 181 in Flatbush. The family spends the summer in Long Branch — as they will for most summers of the 1930s.

1930s

1930: No recorded Lennon events. Norman, seven, continues at P.S. 181 in Flatbush; the household remains at Cortelyou Road with summers at Long Branch.
1931: No recorded Lennon events. A family portrait survives from the year showing Barney with Barbara (age four) and Norman (eight) — the earliest image in the archive of the three together.
1932: In January the Mailers move from Flatbush to 555 Crown Street in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn — the family's address for the rest of Mailer's childhood. Norman transfers from P.S. 181 to P.S. 161, where he will skip two half-year terms.
1933: In the winter of 1933–34, under the combined influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars novels and the Flash Gordon radio program, Norman — age ten — writes a long science fiction story, "The Martian Invasion." It is his earliest attributed sustained writing.
1934: Norman, eleven, continues at P.S. 161 in Crown Heights. The long science fiction story "The Martian Invasion," begun in the winter of 1933, is completed on this side of the year. A portrait survives from the year.
1935: Norman graduates from P.S. 161 in June — his recorded IQ is 170 — and in September enters Boys' High School in Brooklyn. He spends the summer at the Schneider family hotels in Long Branch. Three family and friend portraits survive from the year.
1936: Norman celebrates his bar mitzvah at Temple Shaari Zadek in Brooklyn on 15 February — his formal entry into Jewish manhood at thirteen.
1937: No events in Lennon's Days RTF. A portrait survives showing fourteen-year-old Norman with a model airplane — an early signal of the aeronautical interest that will carry him to Harvard two years later to study aeronautical engineering (see 1939).
1938: No recorded Lennon events. Norman, fifteen, is a junior at Boys' High School in Brooklyn; the family remains at 555 Crown Street in Crown Heights.
1939: Norman graduates from Boys' High School in June near the top of a 650-member class and in late September enters Harvard to study aeronautical engineering. He had also been accepted by MIT but chose Harvard — partly because MIT would require a year of prep school, and partly, in his own telling, "because the name Harvard resonates with Brooklyn girls." Over the winter he begins discovering modern American literature.

1940s

1940: Mailer's freshman year at Harvard becomes a year of two discoveries. Over the winter and spring he reads his way through modern American fiction — James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck — and in the Treasure Room of Widener Library he finds the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover, still unpublished in the United States, which he later says "changed my sex life, or rather, accelerated it." In the fall he begins a two-semester writing course with Robert Gorham Davis, for which he writes "The Greatest Thing in the World" under the original title "The Suckers and the Setup."
1941: Mailer's sophomore year at Harvard produces his first published story — "The Greatest Thing in the World" in the Harvard Advocate, April — which goes on to win Story magazine's Eighth Annual College Contest and a $100 prize. He is elected to the Advocate editorial board, joins the Signet Society, writes an unpublished first novel over the summer, and in mid-December meets Beatrice Silverman, his first wife, in Chelsea.
1942: Mailer's junior year at Harvard. Two Harvard Advocate stories — "Right Shoe on Left Foot" (May) and "Maybe Next Year" (June). A summer job as an attendant at the Boston State Hospital — formerly the Boston Lunatic Asylum — yields an unpublished play titled "The Naked and the Dead" (unrelated to the 1948 novel but marking the first appearance of that title in Mailer's work).
1943: Mailer graduates from Harvard in May with an S.B. (with honors) in engineering sciences; visits Provincetown with Bea — his first time there, beginning a seven-decade association with Cape Cod; his parents move to 102 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn. No Mailer works published this year.
1944: Mailer is drafted into the U.S. Army in January, marries Bea Silverman on 7 January (she joins the Waves), completes the unpublished novel A Transit to Narcissus in February, is inducted at Camp Upton on 27 March, publishes the novella "A Calculus at Heaven" in Edwin Seaver's Cross-Section (L.B. Fischer, April) — his first book appearance — trains at Fort Bragg and Fort Ord, ships out from San Francisco on 6 December, and arrives in the Philippines by year's end. Reads Anna Karenina and The Decline of the West en route.
1945: Mailer's war year. Transferred in January to the 112th Cavalry Regimental Combat Team in Leyte, he serves in the Luzon campaign as a clerk and wire lineman and, in April, volunteers for a reconnaissance platoon — the experiences that become the chief raw material for The Naked and the Dead. After the war he is a cook in occupied Japan. He meets Francis Irby "Fig" Gwaltney; his paternal grandmother, Celia Mailer, dies.
1946: Discharged from the Army in May, Mailer spends the summer at North Truro, near Provincetown, beginning the war novel that becomes The Naked and the Dead — drawn from the hundreds of letters he had written overseas. After Little, Brown passes on the manuscript over its language, Mailer accepts Rinehart's $1,250 advance in November.
1947: In September Mailer completes The Naked and the Dead in Brooklyn and submits it to Rinehart; in October he and Bea sail for Europe to study at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill. In Paris he begins Barbary Shore and meets Jean Malaquais, who becomes a lifelong friend and his mentor on Marxism.
1948: Mailer publishes The Naked and the Dead on 6 May and becomes a literary sensation at twenty-five; studies at the Sorbonne under the GI Bill; returns from France in July to meet with Lillian Hellman about a stage adaptation and to campaign for Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace.
1949: Mailer follows the NAD year with a politically volatile one. In March he speaks at the 25–27 March Waldorf Conference — his "Trojan horse" remarks denounce both U.S. monopoly capitalism and Soviet state capitalism, generating four reception pieces in politics, the New York Times, the National Guardian, and the New Republic, and the official NCASP transcript. Soon after he breaks with the Progressive Party. By June the Mailers are in Hollywood for the summer, where Jean and Galy Malaquais join them; Mailer works on — and refuses to sell — a Samuel Goldwyn screenplay, drafts and abandons a labor-unions novel, pushes on with Barbary Shore, meets Lois Mayfield Wilson, and (28 August) becomes a father: Susan Mailer is born to Bea.

1950s

1950: A Days-only year — Lennon records no 1950 Mailer publications. Norman and Bea split their time between New York, Provincetown, and ultimately Putney, Vermont, where they settle in October for what will be the final push on Barbary Shore — the novel will be finished there and published by Rinehart the following May.
1951: Barbary Shore is published by Rinehart on 24 May and receives almost uniformly negative reviews — Max Gissen in Time calls it "paceless, tasteless, and graceless," a line Mailer never forgets. In June, Mailer travels with Mickey Knox to Palm Springs, California — the setting for The Deer Park. Over the year he separates from Bea and begins living with Adele Morales in New York (85 Monroe Street, March–June; 14 Pitt Street, September 1951 through June 1952); Bea and Susan move to Mexico. He meets William Styron and James Jones — the three young postwar novelists become immediate friends.
1952: Divorced from Bea in January, Mailer begins work on The Deer Park. He takes a studio in the Ovington Building on Fulton Street, Brooklyn (February); moves to a sixth-floor walkup at 41 First Avenue in October (where he installs his own plumbing); meets Gore Vidal; and makes the first of many annual autumn visits to Mexico to see Susan, stopping in Arkansas to see Fig Gwaltney. On 26 March he debates Dwight Macdonald at Mt. Holyoke College — "I Cannot Choose" versus Macdonald's "I Choose the West." The year sees Mailer's first contribution to Partisan Review (52.1) and the first two of five short stories he will publish in 1952–53 (52.2, 52.3).
1953: A short-fiction year lived mostly at the writing desk. In April, "The Language of Men" (53.2) appears in Esquire — the first of more than forty Mailer appearances in that magazine — alongside an Esquire interview (53.1); two more stories follow in London periodicals ("Pierrot," 53.3; "The Notebook," 53.4). Mailer keeps working on The Deer Park, and he and Adele travel to New Orleans, where he takes peyote "for the first and last time."
1954: A pivotal year. Mailer makes his first appearance in Dissent (54.1, 1 April) and joins its editorial board, where he will remain until the mid-1980s, publishing three pieces in the magazine's first volume (54.1–54.3). He marries Adele Morales on 19 April and completes The Deer Park in the spring — only to have Rinehart suppress the novel in November over six lines of sexual description. After six further rejections, Walter Minton of Putnam's accepts it. On 1 December Mailer begins "Lipton's," a marijuana journal that will swell to some 112,000 words and feed directly into "The White Negro."
1955: Mailer's most consequential year of the decade so far. He finishes the "Lipton's" journal (4 March); his nephew Peter is born to his sister Barbara (11 April); The Deer Park is published by Putnam's on 14 October and becomes a bestseller; and two weeks later, on 26 October, the first issue of The Village Voice — which Mailer co-founds and names with Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher — appears. He publishes eight pieces across the year (55.1–55.8), among them the essay "The Homosexual Villain" that he later called "the bravest thing I ever did."
1956: From January to early May Mailer writes seventeen weekly "Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers" columns (56.1–56.17) for The Village Voice, then resigns over editorial differences with his partners — closing with a defense of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. In May the novella "The Man Who Studied Yoga" (56.25) appears. The Mailers summer in Europe (Spain, Germany — touring Buchenwald — Italy, and Paris, where Jean Malaquais introduces them to James Baldwin); in the fall they move to Bridgewater, Connecticut, near William Styron. Mailer takes up boxing under Al Morales and builds an orgone box on Wilhelm Reich's pattern.
1957: Mailer's second daughter, Danielle, is born to Adele on 16 March. In the summer Dissent publishes "The White Negro" (57.1), the essay — grown out of "Lipton's" — that defines the hipster and becomes Mailer's most influential. He also completes a first draft of a stage version of The Deer Park (57.2).
1958: After a bitter falling-out with William Styron and growing boredom with country living, the Mailers leave Bridgewater and move back to New York, to 73 Perry Street in Greenwich Village. In the fall Mailer lectures for a week at the University of Chicago, where he meets Robert F. Lucid, his future archivist and lifelong friend; he is invited into the Actors' Studio, where staged readings of his Deer Park play are performed. The year's eight publications (58.1–58.7, plus 58.4a) extend the "White Negro" debate and include the antagonistic Mike Wallace interviews.
1959: The decade's capstone year. On 28 September Mailer's third daughter, Elizabeth Anne ("Betsy"), is born to Adele; on 6 November Putnam's publishes Advertisements for Myself (59.13), the omnibus that gathers up the decade's work and relaunches Mailer's reputation. City Lights issues "The White Negro" as a pamphlet (59.8a). Across the year Mailer publishes some twenty pieces (59.1–59.19) and takes part in the University of Iowa and Judson Church symposia on the writer and mass culture.

1960s

1960: The year that turns. In November Mailer publishes "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (60.9), his admiring portrait of John F. Kennedy at the Los Angeles convention and the first of his political-convention narratives — an early, important precursor to the New Journalism. Weeks later, in the early morning of 20 November, after a party at the West 94th Street apartment meant to launch a run for mayor of New York, he stabs his wife Adele with a penknife and is committed to Bellevue for seventeen days. The mayoral run collapses; he will not actually run until 1969.
1961: Mailer's year of legal limbo and intellectual recovery — indicted (January) and arraigned for the November 1960 stabbing of Adele Morales, pleading guilty on 4 May, and given a suspended sentence with three years' probation on 13 November. Separates from Adele in March; meets Lady Jeanne Campbell at Gore Vidal's New York apartment that same month. The Y.M.H.A. closes the curtain on his February reading; Esquire prints his protest letter; he reviews Genet's The Blacks in The Voice and is answered by Lorraine Hansberry; debuts at Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Playboy; takes a London press tour for the André Deutsch British edition of Advertisements for Myself (with The Time of Her Time censored); ends the year in Austin and writes the first of his many forewords for other writers.
1962: Mailer's year of third marriage and major literary infrastructure. Divorces Adele Morales in Juarez (late February) and secretly marries Lady Jeanne Campbell on 4 May; in late spring they move into 142 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn — the brownstone Mailer had purchased in 1960 and will live in until his death. Publishes Deaths for the Ladies, his first book of poems (Putnam's, 30 March per the Works register; January per the published Days). Daughter Kate Cailean Mailer born to Jeanne on 18 August. Attends the Edinburgh International Writers' Conference 20–24 August, meeting Henry Miller and William Burroughs for the first time. Debates William F. Buckley Jr. in Chicago (22 September); covers the Patterson–Liston I championship fight (25 September) and the press-conference aftermath. Launches two parallel columns: The Big Bite in Esquire (November 1962 to December 1963) and Responses and Reactions in Commentary (December 1962 to October 1963). Krassner's eleven-page Impolite Interview appears in The Realist no. 40 (December). Separates from Lady Jeanne in late fall.
1963: Mailer's periodical-blizzard year and the year of the JFK assassination. Meets Beverly Bentley on 10 March in New York; covers the 22 September 1962 Patterson-Liston I aftermath in 'Ten Thousand Words a Minute' (February Esquire); reads at Carnegie Hall on 31 May. Publishes more than thirty pieces in the year — including all twelve remaining Big Bite Esquire columns, five remaining Responses and Reactions Commentary columns, the major literary critic essay 'Some Children of the Goddess' in the July Esquire, and 'The Mary McCarthy Case' in the 17 October NYRB. The Presidential Papers, his second miscellany, appears on 8 November from Putnam's — two weeks before the Kennedy assassination of 22 November, after which the jacket photograph showing Mailer in a Boston rocking chair is changed for the 1964 paperback. In the fall, Scott Meredith becomes Mailer's literary agent and negotiates the An American Dream sale to Dial Press and the movie rights to MGM. The December Big Bite ends with Mailer's public announcement: 'One is tempted to call this novel An American Dream.' Divorces Lady Jeanne Campbell in Juarez on 16 December and marries actress Beverly Bentley in his Brooklyn apartment on 29 December.
1964: The An American Dream serialization year. Mailer publishes the novel in eight monthly installments in Esquire from January through August — completing each chapter six weeks before it appears — and then revises the Esquire text substantially for the Dial Press book edition. His first son, Michael Burks Mailer, is born to Beverly Bentley on 17 March. In late January Mailer debates William F. Buckley Jr. on David Susskind's Open End; in February he is in the Miami audience when Muhammad Ali defeats Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship; in mid-July he covers the Republican Convention in San Francisco for Esquire (the resulting essay 'In the Red Light' appears in the November issue); in October the Voice prints Mailer's endorsement of Bobby Kennedy for U.S. Senate; in November Book Week prints his review of LBJ's My Hope for America two days before the 3 November Johnson landslide; in December he completes a second revision of An American Dream on the Dial Press galleys. The Marcus Paris Review 'Art of Fiction XXXII' interview — conducted at 142 Columbia Heights on 6 July 1963 — appears in the Winter-Spring 1964 issue; Mailer's Special Preface to the Bantam paperback of The Presidential Papers responds to the JFK assassination.
1965: The year of An American Dream: Mailer testifies for Burroughs's Naked Lunch at its Boston obscenity trial in January; the revised novel is published by Dial Press on 15 March (Deutsch in the UK on 26 April) to sharply divided reviews and strong sales. Mailer hosts a victory party for boxer Jose Torres in March, visits Alaska in April, speaks against the Vietnam War at Berkeley on 21 May and at a Harvard teach-in in July, and addresses the Modern Language Association on the American novel in December.
1966: Mailer's second son, Stephen McLeod Mailer, is born to Beverly Bentley on 10 March; in June Mailer buys a house at 565 Commercial Street in Provincetown, his home through 1969. The first stage version of The Deer Park (with Beverly as Lulu Meyers) is mounted in Provincetown in August; the Warner Brothers film of An American Dream premieres on 26 August; and Dial publishes his third miscellany, Cannibals and Christians, on 29 August. Through the year Mailer speaks at anti-Vietnam War rallies with Robert Lowell, Susan Sontag, and others.
1967: A prolific year: The Deer Park: A Play opens at the Theatre de Lys (31 January, 127 performances); Mailer is inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in May; he publishes four books — The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer, The Deer Park: A Play, Why Are We in Vietnam?, and The Bullfight; makes two experimental films, Wild 90 and Beyond the Law; and on 21 October joins the March on the Pentagon, the experience that becomes The Armies of the Night.
1968: Mailer's annus mirabilis of nonfiction: The Armies of the Night is published on 6 May (twenty years to the day after The Naked and the Dead) to near-unanimous acclaim and will win the Pulitzer and National Book Award; Miami and the Siege of Chicago follows in October. His films Wild 90 and Beyond the Law premiere, and he shoots a third, Maidstone, on Long Island — its set marked by the filmed hammer fight with Rip Torn. He covers the 1968 conventions and the violence in Chicago.
1969: The Armies of the Night wins the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the George Polk Award in the spring. Mailer runs for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York with Jimmy Breslin on a '51st state' platform, finishing fourth of five in the 17 June primary. In the summer he covers the Apollo 11 moon landing for Life — the first installments of what becomes Of a Fire on the Moon — and receives an honorary doctorate from Rutgers.

1970s

1970: Mailer publishes the third and last of his Life moon installments in January and continues his public commentary on the Chicago Seven trial. In May he serves a brief jail term in Virginia for his 1967 Pentagon conviction, calling Nixon 'the living embodiment of Uriah Heep.' His third experimental film, Maidstone, premieres through the summer and fall - Provincetown, Venice, New York, and London. By year's end the Life moon pieces are gathered as Of a Fire on the Moon (published January 1971), and Mailer separates from Beverly Bentley.
1971: Mailer's most prolific publishing year: four books in twelve months. Of a Fire on the Moon appears in January; 'The Prisoner of Sex' fills the March Harper's and helps force out editor Willie Morris; King of the Hill follows the March Ali-Frazier fight; The Prisoner of Sex appears as a book in May; Maidstone: A Mystery and The Long Patrol close the year. He moderates the combative 30 April Town Hall 'Dialogue on Women's Liberation' and ends the year trading blows with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show. Maggie Alexandra is born to Carol Stevens in March.
1972: A year on the road. Deep in debt and in arrears to the IRS, Mailer lectures at more than twenty colleges, often showing his films. Existential Errands, his fourth miscellany, appears in April; he covers the 1972 conventions for the book St. George and the Godfather, out in late October. In September he and Carol Stevens move to Stockbridge, Massachusetts; on 12 October his father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, dies. He begins the long-promised 'Egyptian novel' (Ancient Evenings), meets Lawrence Schiller and starts Marilyn, and first meets J. Michael Lennon at Western Illinois University.
1973: Mailer turns fifty on 5 February and announces 'The Fifth Estate' at a notorious Four Seasons party; the Watergate break-in that June lends the idea a retrospective prescience. In August he publishes Marilyn: A Biography, a 400,000-copy bestseller attended by a plagiarism dispute and his public claim that Monroe may have been murdered, and receives the Edward MacDowell Medal at Peterborough. He spends the fall on a long Marilyn book tour.
1974: A quieter, between-books year. Jack Gelber's stage adaptation of Barbary Shore runs in January; in May Mailer publishes The Faith of Graffiti, his essay on New York's graffiti writers, simultaneously in Esquire and as a book with Lawrence Schiller and the photographers Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar. He pays a warm debt to his old mentor Jean Malaquais with a preface to The Joker, and keeps deflecting questions about the long Egyptian novel he is slowly writing.
1975: A pivotal personal year. In March Mailer meets Barbara Norris - the future Norris Church Mailer, his sixth and last wife - in Arkansas through his army friend Fig Gwaltney. In July he publishes The Fight, his account of the Ali-Foreman 'Rumble in the Jungle' and the last of his eight consecutive third-person books. In December he separates from Carol Stevens and moves to Brooklyn with Norris and her son Matthew. The two-part Rolling Stone interview opens the year with his fullest talk yet on God and the Devil.
1976: Mailer receives the National Arts Club's Gold Medal for Literature in February. He publishes two books - Some Honorable Men (April), gathering his four convention narratives, and Genius and Lust (October), his Henry Miller anthology and his longest piece of literary criticism. He profiles Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia, writes 'A Harlot High and Low' (the seed of Harlot's Ghost), wins a Playboy fiction award for the screenplay 'Trial of the Warlock,' and keeps grinding away at the Egyptian novel.
1977: A quiet, between-books year given over to the Egyptian novel. Mailer publishes no book of his own - only reissue prefaces, the Harvard-Advocate memoir 'Our Man at Harvard,' and the television essay 'Of a Small and Modest Malignancy.' In October he renews his feud with Gore Vidal in a much-reported scuffle at Lally Weymouth's party, and he testifies for the defense at a Canadian drug-smuggling trial.
1978: Another year given to the Egyptian novel, with one notable publication: A Transit to Narcissus, a facsimile of the novel Mailer wrote in 1943, before The Naked and the Dead. His third son, John Buffalo, is born to Norris Church in April, and Judith McNally becomes his assistant. By December, news of his divorce from Beverly Bentley and his forthcoming Executioner's Song are both in the papers.
1979: Mailer's biggest book lands: The Executioner's Song, the 1,056-page 'true life novel' of Gary Gilmore, built with Lawrence Schiller from over 15,000 pages of interviews, is published in October to a front-page Joan Didion rave and a long bestseller run. It wins the Playboy fiction award and (in 1980) the Pulitzer. The fall is a marathon of book-tour interviews. In early November Mailer meets the convict Jack Henry Abbott at Marion Penitentiary, and his divorce from Beverly Bentley grinds on in the Boston courts.

1980s

1980: In April The Executioner's Song wins the Pulitzer Prize. In June Mailer brings Jack Henry Abbott's prison prose before the public in the New York Review of Books. In November comes the famous marital shuffle - he divorces Beverly Bentley, marries and divorces Carol Stevens, and marries Norris Church on the 11th - and the publication of Of Women and Their Elegance, his 'imaginary memoir' of Marilyn Monroe. He plays Stanford White in Milos Forman's Ragtime and takes part in the Munich documentary The Sanction to Write.
1981: The Jack Henry Abbott year. In June Mailer writes the introduction to and helps arrange Random House's publication of In the Belly of the Beast, and his advocacy helps win Abbott's parole; on 18 July, six weeks after his release, Abbott stabs and kills the 22-year-old actor Richard Adan, and Mailer is savaged in the press for his sponsorship. Alongside the catastrophe: Mailer plays Stanford White in Milos Forman's Ragtime, publishes a capital-punishment essay in Parade, and gives a run of interviews on the writing life.
1982: The Abbott trial dominates the winter and spring: Mailer testifies in January, accepts a 'very large responsibility' for Richard Adan's death, and is attacked across the media; Abbott is convicted of manslaughter on 22 January and sentenced to fifteen years to life in April. In June Little, Brown publishes Pieces and Pontifications, his fifth miscellany, edited with J. Michael Lennon. The TV miniseries of The Executioner's Song, from Mailer's own screenplay, airs in November; Hilary Mills's Mailer: A Biography, the first book-length life, appears the same month; and the first excerpts from Ancient Evenings begin to surface.
1983: Mailer turns sixty and publishes Ancient Evenings, the Egyptian novel eleven years in the writing, on 4 April - to his 'best and worst reviews' and a months-long promotional tour. In February-March he serves as the University of Pennsylvania's first Pappas Fellow, lecturing on 'The White Negro Reconsidered.' In August he leaves Little, Brown for Random House on a $4 million contract, with Jason Epstein as his new editor; in October he buys the house at 627 Commercial Street that becomes his year-round Provincetown home. He is nominated for an Emmy for the Executioner's Song screenplay.
1984: Mailer publishes Tough Guys Don't Dance, his Provincetown murder mystery and first Random House novel, on 20 August, riding it to number four on the bestseller list through a months-long American and British tour. In the summer he is elected president of PEN American Center for a 1984–1986 term and begins planning the 1986 International PEN Congress. He spends fifteen days in Russia in March, the basis of a Parade essay, and on 7 December is inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, taking the chair vacated by Tennessee Williams.
1985: Mailer spends the year as president of PEN American Center organizing and raising money for the 48th International PEN Congress, set for New York in January 1986 — a round of readings, the 'PEN Celebrations,' and a final public pairing with Gore Vidal in November. His mother, Fanny Schneider Mailer, dies on 28 August. He publishes his major craft essay 'The Hazards and Sources of Writing,' writes an introduction for his old friend John W. Aldridge, and is the subject of Peter Manso's oral biography Mailer: His Life and Times. He lets slip that he is at work on a long, secret novel — the future Harlot's Ghost.
1986: Mailer's PEN presidency peaks and nearly breaks in January, when the 48th International PEN Congress he organized in New York is convulsed by his invitation of Secretary of State George Shultz and by a women writers' protest, led by Betty Friedan, over the scarcity of women on its panels; Mailer is elected American PEN president by acclamation on 12 January. In the spring the Actors Studio stages his Marilyn Monroe play Strawhead, with his daughter Kate as Monroe. In the fall he adapts and directs the film of Tough Guys Don't Dance in Provincetown for Cannon Films, on a seven-week, $5 million shoot.
1987: Mailer's film of Tough Guys Don't Dance is finished, screened out of competition at Cannes (where he sat on the jury in May), and released in the United States on 18 September to largely hostile reviews and a weak opening weekend. He spends most of the year promoting and defending it in dozens of interviews, ranging over all his films and the difference between writing and directing. By fall he has begun to say openly that his novel-in-progress is about the CIA — the future Harlot's Ghost.
1988: Mailer works steadily on his CIA novel, Harlot's Ghost — more than 1,000 pages by year's end — and lets the public see its first pieces in advance excerpts in Esquire ('A Piece of Harlot's Ghost,' July) and Playboy ('The Changing of the Guard,' December). J. Michael Lennon's Conversations with Norman Mailer collects 34 of his interviews. In April Mailer endorses Jesse Jackson in a much-noticed New York Times op-ed; he also writes on Mike Tyson and publishes the first selection from his 1954–55 Lipton's journal.
1989: The fatwa against Salman Rushdie draws Mailer into a leading public role for free expression: he reads a statement at a 22 February writers' meeting, represents the writers at a March news conference, and joins the international 'Words for Salman Rushdie.' He is more than a thousand pages into Harlot's Ghost, with another advance excerpt appearing in Story. He meets Fidel Castro in Havana, refines his theology in 'Cosmic Ventures,' and offers literary lists — his influences and his ten favorite American novels.

1990s

1990: A quiet year given almost entirely to writing Harlot's Ghost. Mailer surfaces mainly in interviews on sex and ego (Carole Mallory's 'The Power of Sex'; a Cosmopolitan self-interview), reads at a Provincetown benefit, and speaks on Hemingway — 'maybe the most competitive American writer who ever lived' — at a J.F.K. Library conference.
1991: On 2 October Random House publishes Harlot's Ghost, Mailer's 1,310-page novel of the CIA — his longest book, ending 'TO BE CONTINUED' — to a vast, divided press and a public feud with the critic John Simon. The novel reaches the bestseller lists, and on 13 November Governor Cuomo names Mailer the first New York State Author. Mailer becomes writer-at-large at Vanity Fair (a review of American Psycho, a Gulf War essay), and Carl Rollyson publishes the third Mailer biography.
1992: In the wake of Harlot's Ghost, Mailer lectures at CIA headquarters to a standing-room crowd and meets Director Robert Gates. The Kennedy assassination preoccupies him: he reviews Oliver Stone's JFK, writes the imaginary play 'Earl and Lyndon,' prefaces Carl Oglesby's assassination study, and debates art and history at Town Hall. He returns to convention reporting with 'By Heaven Inspired' on the Republican Convention, eulogizes the writer Marco Vassi, and visits Wilkes University.
1993: In February Mailer conceives and directs an all-star staged reading of Shaw's 'Don Juan in Hell' at Carnegie Hall — playing the Commander opposite Gore Vidal's Devil, Susan Sontag, and Gay Talese. In the summer he shows his line drawings in Provincetown and quarrels publicly with Picasso's biographer John Richardson over his own forthcoming Picasso book, while beginning research on a book about Lee Harvey Oswald. He writes a boxing essay on Ryan O'Neal and keynotes a Dallas assassination symposium.
1994: A between-books year: Mailer researches his Lee Harvey Oswald book and looks for a publisher for his young-Picasso biography after leaving Random House over it. The year's most visible piece is his Esquire cover-story interview with Madonna, 'Like a Lady.' Otherwise he surfaces mainly in letters to editors — answering Pauline Kael, Garry Wills, and a challenge over Marilyn — and a memorial tribute to his late Provincetown friend Eddie Bonetti.
1995: Mailer publishes two books a few months apart: Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (Random House, May), built with Lawrence Schiller from Soviet files and Dallas interviews, and Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (Atlantic Monthly Press, October), the long-gestating art biography for which he left Random House. Both draw heavy, divided reviews — the Picasso book his worst notices ever. In March he spends four days in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and in May gives the Wilkes University commencement address.
1996: A year of political journalism and tributes between books. Mailer covers the 1996 campaign in two long pieces — an Esquire essay-interview with Patrick Buchanan, 'Searching for Deliverance,' and 'War of the Oxymorons' on the conventions, his first appearance in George. He gives interview codas on Oswald and Picasso, writes centenary statements on Fitzgerald and Dos Passos, and is the subject of Barry Leeds's memoir 'Mailer and Me.' He appears at an American Writers event in Paris and receives a PEN Oakland award.
1997: Mailer publishes The Gospel According to the Son, his novel narrated in the first person by Jesus, on 2 May — Random House serialized the whole of it in the New York Daily News first — and spends the year defending it on a long American and British tour against sharply divided reviews. He announces a 1,500-page career retrospective for his 75th birthday (The Time of Our Time, 1998), gives a major political interview to Christopher Hitchens, and pays tribute to the late Allen Ginsberg.
1998: Mailer turns 75 the same spring The Naked and the Dead turns 50. Random House marks the double anniversary with The Time of Our Time (6 May), a 1,286-page retrospective arranged by the dates of the events described; Henry Holt reissues The Naked and the Dead with a new introduction. The publication party at the Rainbow Room draws Muhammad Ali and literary New York. Mailer gives a wave of interviews on religion and craft, attacks Clinton over the Lewinsky affair, and reviews Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full.
1999: A year of interviews, tributes, and political journalism between books. Mailer reflects on his Paris and Manhattan youth, gives Christopher Busa his fullest interview on Provincetown, and writes a Washington Post op-ed against the Kosovo bombing. The decade's biographies culminate in Mary Dearborn's Mailer: A Biography, the fourth full-length life, and Norman Podhoretz's bitter memoir Ex-Friends. Mailer says he is at last ready to write the Harlot's Ghost sequel.

2000s

2000: A between-books year. Mailer rebuts Mary Dearborn's biography in the press, quietly begins the years of research and writing that will become The Castle in the Forest, and tours the festival and interview circuit — Edinburgh, Australia, a New Yorker festival pairing with Martin Amis — talking about feminism, corporate capitalism, religion, and the Clinton scandal. He contributes a tender statement on his marriage to Norris for the photography book Couples.
2001: Mailer takes the stage as Ernest Hemingway in the touring dramatic dialogue 'Zelda, Scott and Ernest,' with George Plimpton and Norris Church Mailer. On 11 September he watches the World Trade Center attacks from Provincetown and gives an early, characteristically provocative response to the London Times. Wilkes University dedicates a Mailer Room. He writes a foreword for Thomas Roma's prison-court photographs and keeps working on the long novel that will become The Castle in the Forest.
2002: Turning 79, Mailer keeps the 'Zelda, Scott and Ernest' dialogue on stage and devotes his public voice to the gathering war: a run of impassioned post-9/11 interviews — the BBC, Dotson Rader, The American Conservative — that he would gather the next year as Why Are We at War? Lawrence Schiller turns their Robert Hanssen investigation and Mailer's miniseries screenplay into the book Into the Mirror. The James Jones Literary Society gives him its Lifetime Achievement Award in Paris.
2003: Mailer turns 80 and publishes three books — The Spooky Art (on his birthday), Modest Gifts, and the anti-war polemic Why Are We at War? — while emerging as one of the most outspoken American critics of the Iraq War.
2004: At 81, walking on canes, Mailer spends an election year campaigning in print against the Iraq War and the Bush administration; publishes the Playboy 'Immodest Proposals' platform and a run of interviews, holds two extended father-son conversations with John Buffalo Mailer, and sees J. Michael Lennon's edition of his An American Dream letters into print.
2005: Mailer, 82, sells his vast personal archive to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin — the year's central event, drawing wide press — while continuing his political-theological provocations (the Sartre-centenary essay, the Reagan/Bush 'God's chosen envoy' blog post) and looking back at his Provincetown years.
2006: Mailer, 83, publishes The Big Empty, a book of dialogues with his son John Buffalo Mailer, and gives the interviews surrounding it; a Tokyo interview carries the first public notice of his last completed novel, The Castle in the Forest, due in early 2007.
2007: Mailer publishes his last completed novel, The Castle in the Forest, in January — the young Hitler narrated by a minion of the Devil — and gives dozens of interviews around it; in October the conversation-book On God appears. He makes his last public appearance on 22 July and dies in New York on 10 November 2007, aged 84.
2008: The first year after Mailer's death. On 9 April some 1,200 people gather at Carnegie Hall for the memorial 'The Time of His Time'; posthumous publication of his work begins — thirty-eight letters in The New Yorker, his Blue Night introduction, and a clutch of archival pieces in the inaugural Mailer Review.
2009: The posthumous publication of Mailer's correspondence begins in earnest: J. Michael Lennon edits four letter-series in Playboy and the New York Review of Books, and the first memoirs by those who knew Mailer appear (Kaylie Jones, Carole Mallory).

2010s

2010: Norris Church Mailer publishes her memoir A Ticket to the Circus and dies on 11 November 2010; Lawrence Schiller's oversize Taschen Moonfire abridges Of a Fire on the Moon, and Dwayne Raymond's Mornings with Mailer recalls Mailer's last Provincetown years.
2011: A second oversize Taschen photo-book abridges Marilyn; an interview on aging and a New York Times tour of Mailer's last home appear; and The Mailer Review devotes 166 pages to the memory of Norris Church Mailer.
2012: A posthumous-recovery year: The Mailer Review prints 'The Blood of the Blunt,' a previously unpublished short story of about 1951 drawn from the Ransom Center papers, and the uncut version of a 1991 Lennon interview.
2013: A landmark posthumous year: Random House publishes The Mind of an Outlaw, the only comprehensive collection of Mailer's essays, and Simon & Schuster publishes J. Michael Lennon's authorized biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life — both on 15 October. The Mailer Review recovers another early story, 'Love-Buds.'
2014: J. Michael Lennon's Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (714 letters) appears from Random House — the capstone of the posthumous letter project — along with the Taschen JFK / Superman volume; The Mailer Review prints another recovered story and an excerpt from Mailer's last interview.
2015: The Norman Mailer Center and Society continue their work — a Taschen reception for the JFK volume, and a December event with Salman Rushdie — while The Mailer Review recovers the story 'The Thalian Adventure' and prints Danielle Mailer's memoir-speech 'The Writer's Daughter.'
2016: Taschen issues an oversize abridged edition of The Fight; The Mailer Review prints 'The Collision' — Mailer's earliest surviving fiction, written at age ten in 1933 — and two more Mailer Society speeches by his children.
2017: A year of Mailer scholarship and recovery: The Mailer Review prints the last of its run of recovered c. 1951 stories, Maggie McKinley publishes the first single-author critical study of Mailer's whole career, and the Society holds its fifteenth annual conference in Sarasota.
2018: J. Michael and Donna Pedro Lennon publish the revised and expanded edition of Norman Mailer: Works and Days — the bio-bibliography that is the source edition of this digital project. The year's secondary record also includes Lennon's TLS essay on Mailer's library.
2019: The Mailer Review re-presents Mailer's story 'The Last Night' with a manuscript facsimile and carries the Sipiora–Lennon conversation on the state of Mailer studies; the Society holds its seventeenth annual conference in Wilkes-Barre.

2020s

2020: A posthumous year, recorded chiefly through the fourteenth volume of The Mailer Review. J. Michael Lennon's memoir-essay The Archivist's Apprentice appears in Life Writing Annual; Mailer's fourth wife, Beverly Bentley, and the Provincetown editor Chris Busa both die during the year.
2021: A year of Mailer's afterlife. His sister Barbara Mailer Wasserman publishes her memoir Love of My Life at ninety-four; Maggie McKinley edits the essay collection Norman Mailer in Context; and a Boston Globe column revisits Mailer's coinage 'factoid.'
2022: A posthumous year on the approach to the Mailer centennial. It opens with the 'Cancel Mailer' controversy after Random House drops a planned centenary essay collection; the TLS prints the first selection from the 'Lipton's Journal' in August; and in November two centenary books appear — J. Michael Lennon's Mailer's Last Days and Robert J. Begiebing's Norman Mailer at 100.
2023: The centenary of Mailer's birth (31 January 1923). The Norman Mailer Society marks the hundredth year with the commemorative volume Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 and its twentieth annual conference; Arcade publishes the democracy anthology A Mysterious Country; and the Library of America pairs The Naked and the Dead with Mailer's 1945–46 letters.
2024: The Norman Mailer Society holds its 21st annual conference at St. Pete Beach, Florida, with journalist David Margolick as keynote speaker.
2025: The Norman Mailer Society's 22nd annual conference, 'What Would Mailer Say?', convenes at Wilkes University and marks the grand opening of the Mailer Collection in the Farley Library Archives — a permanent home for Mailer research materials.
2026: A posthumous year of Mailer reception. In June, several pieces in the press take up Mailer: an Economic Times op-ed on the 'fug' of The Naked and the Dead, a CrimeReads reconsideration of Tough Guys Don't Dance and its film, Taki's American Conservative memoir of his friendship with Mailer, Esquire's list of the 26 most American books with The Naked and the Dead among them, and a Critic essay on Mailer, Greer, and the sex wars. In September, Legs McNeil's memoir Resident Punk revives Mailer's late-1970s traffic with the downtown punk scene.