Gary Gilmore
Utah murderer (1940-1977) who killed two men in July 1976 and, refusing to appeal, was executed by firing squad on 17 January 1977 - the first US execution after the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty. The subject of Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979).
Gary Gilmore, a Utah parolee, murdered two young men — a motel manager and a gas-station attendant — over two July 1976 nights, and then, sentenced to death, refused to appeal, insisting on his own execution. On 17 January 1977 he was killed by a firing squad at Utah State Prison, the first person executed in the United States after the 1976 reinstatement of capital punishment. His case, his obsession with his own death, and his love affair with Nicole Baker became the matter of Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (79.14), built from over 15,000 pages of interviews assembled by Lawrence Schiller. Mailer read him as “another major American protagonist,” a man “malignant at his worst and heroic at his best.”
Stub created during the 1979 ingest.
Related pages
Referenced by 11
Works
- An Interview with Norman Mailer (Aldridge)
- Introduction to In the Belly of the Beast
- Mailer on Gilmore
- PW Interviews: Norman Mailer
- The Executioner's Song
- The Executioner's Song (Playboy, Part I)
- The Executioner's Song (Playboy, Part II)
- The Executioner's Song (Playboy, Part III)
- Until Dead: Thoughts on Capital Punishment