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.
The revised Works and Days
J. Michael Lennon and Donna Pedro Lennon publish the revised and expanded edition of Norman Mailer: Works and Days, enlarging their 2000 bio-bibliography to take in the post-2007 outpouring — the recovered short works, Selected Letters (2014), A Double Life (2013), The Mind of an Outlaw (2013), and the reissues — and correcting the record through 2016. Jerry Lucas helped revise and edit the edition. It is the source from which this digital project descends; in his introduction Lennon calls Mailer “Proteus” and renews the book’s “impossible task worth attempting.”
February — the Library of America
The Library of America admits Mailer to its canon-making series with a two-volume gathering of his 1960s work, edited by J. Michael Lennon: Four Books of the 1960s (the fiction and journalism) and Collected Essays of the 1960s, also issued together as The Sixties boxed set. The reissue prompts David Denby‘s Harper’s reappraisal, “Mr. Mailer Goes to Washington,” which rereads The Armies of the Night fifty years on and finds it “entirely contemporary.” In March the set draws further notice — Esquire’s “Fighting Words” and Amy Brady‘s Village Voice interview with Lennon.
Also in 2018
Lennon publishes “The Naked and the Read: Inside the Library of Norman Mailer” in The Times Literary Supplement (9 March), an essay on Mailer’s 7,000-volume working library.
October — the Society conference
October 25–27 — The Norman Mailer Society holds its 16th annual conference in Macon, Georgia, marking the 50th anniversary of The Armies of the Night and the 70th of The Naked and the Dead. Conference program (PDF).