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.'
15 October — two landmark books
Random House publishes The Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays of Norman Mailer (13.1), edited by Phillip Sipiora with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem — forty-nine essays, the only comprehensive collection of Mailer’s essays. The same day, Simon & Schuster publishes J. Michael Lennon‘s authorized biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life (13.2).
The twin publications draw wide notice. In Tablet, Abby Margulies pairs them in “Norman Mailer Speaks to America From Beyond the Grave,” arguing that Mailer’s true subject was America itself. Earlier in the autumn, Ian Brunskill had taken the 2009 reissue of The Faith of Graffiti as his occasion in “The Writing on the Wall” (The American Interest), reading Mailer’s 1974 essay against the street art of the Arab Spring.
Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament
Through the year, the artist Matthew Barney films River of Fundament (released 2014), an epic built on Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, shooting partly inside a full-scale reconstruction of Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights home — one measure of Mailer’s hold on a later generation of artists.
The Mailer Review
The Mailer Review recovers another early story from the Ransom Center, “Love-Buds” (13.3), written in Mailer’s Harvard senior year.
October — the Society conference
October 23–27 — The Norman Mailer Society holds its 11th annual conference in Sarasota, Florida, on the theme “Norman Mailer at 90: Novelist, Journalist, Essayist, Filmmaker, and Much More.” Conference program (PDF).