Norman Mailer: Works and Days

Marilyn: A Biography

Mailer's picture-biography of Marilyn Monroe, produced by Lawrence Schiller - a 95,000-word 'novel biography' grown from a planned photo preface. A bestseller (400,000 copies) attended by a plagiarism dispute and Mailer's public claim that Monroe may have been murdered. His first full-length life-study.

Marilyn: A Biography first-edition cover (Grosset and Dunlap, 1973)

Marilyn: A Biography — its full title continuing Pictures by the World’s Foremost Photographers — was produced by Lawrence Schiller and designed by Allen Hurlburt, and published by Grosset and Dunlap on 1 August 1973 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 8 October). Mailer’s contribution was commissioned as a 25,000-word preface to a selection of Marilyn Monroe photographs; it grew into a 95,000-word biography. The book carries no dedication and reproduces 111 photographs across 271 pages, at $19.95.

It was Mailer’s first full-length biography — the start of the string of life-studies (of Picasso, of Lee Harvey Oswald, of Jesus, in their way) that would run for thirty years — and he wrote it without having met his subject, by his own description a “novel biography” reconstructing Monroe from her films and the existing literature. A main Book-of-the-Month-Club selection with a first run of 240,000, it reached the top of the bestseller list with 400,000 copies in print (73.31, 73.45).

Two controversies attended it. Mailer’s borrowings from the earlier Monroe biographies of Maurice Zolotow and Fred Lawrence Guiles drew plagiarism charges, settled out of court, with retractions noted in Mailer’s December advertisement (73.45). And at an 18 July press conference Mailer urged that Monroe’s death be investigated as a possible murder, citing her reported tie to Robert Kennedy — drawing days of coverage (73.19, 73.21, 73.23-73.26) and a contentious 60 Minutes exchange with Mike Wallace. Reviews split between admiration and outrage, the most famous being Pauline Kael’s “A Rip-Off with Genius” (New York Times Book Review); Mailer called the book “one of my best.” Advance excerpts ran in the Ladies’ Home Journal (73.17, 73.29), the Atlantic (73.28), and the New York Review of Books (73.34). A revised softcover followed (75.3); the 1988 reprint is titled Marilyn: The Classic; portions appear in The Time of Our Time (98.7).

Referenced by 29

Works

Days

People

Publishers

First published: 1973-08-01
Form: biography
Lennon & Lennon: 73.30
Cite as: /works/1973-08-01-marilyn-a-biography
Last updated: 2026-06-04