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.
The centenary year. Mailer was born on 31 January 1923; 2023 marks one hundred years, and his afterlife is gathered up in a commemorative volume, an anthology of his political thought, and a new Library of America edition.
The centennial in the press
January 31 — On the centennial day itself, Ronald K. Fried publishes a long interview with J. Michael Lennon in The Millions, occasioned by Lennon’s Mailer’s Last Days.
February 17 — James Marcus, in The Times Literary Supplement, publishes “In the Ring with Mailer,” a centennial omnibus review of Richard Bradford’s Tough Guy, Lennon’s Mailer’s Last Days, and Begiebing’s Norman Mailer at 100.
The centenary touched off a wide wave of coverage: reviews of the Library of America volume by Sam Sacks (Wall Street Journal) and Rob Madole (The Baffler); Robert Dean Lurie‘s National Review essay and Taki‘s Spectator column; centenary appraisals by David Mikics (Tablet, Al Arabiya), the Economist, Philip Martin, and Jesse Tisch; reviews of A Mysterious Country by David Masciotra (Washington Monthly) and Peter Keough (The Arts Fuse); and Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source episode with the anthology’s editors.
The centenary and the Society
To coincide with Mailer’s hundredth birthday and the Norman Mailer Society‘s twentieth annual conference (Austin, Texas, 20–22 April; program (PDF)), the Society publishes Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (20 February), a volume of short remembrances edited by Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley. (The Society’s first conference was held in 2003; with no conference in 2021, the twentieth falls in the centennial year.)
A Mysterious Country
Arcade Publishing issues A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy, edited by J. Michael Lennon and John Buffalo Mailer — a centenary anthology of Mailer’s writing on American democracy, drawn from his books, essays, interviews, letters, speeches, and talk-show appearances.
The Library of America
On 20 August the Library of America publishes The Naked and the Dead & Selected Letters 1945–1946, edited by J. Michael Lennon — the 1948 war novel reprinted with a selection of Mailer’s wartime correspondence, seventy-five years after the book first appeared.
November — the documentary’s world premiere
Jeff Zimbalist‘s feature documentary How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer has its world premiere at DOC NYC; it would reach U.S. theaters the following June.
Related pages
- 2022 | 2024
- Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 | A Mysterious Country | NAD & Selected Letters
- A Hundred Years of Norman Mailer | In the Ring with Mailer
- Norman Mailer Society | Gerald R. Lucas