Mailer: A Biography
Hilary Mills's Mailer: A Biography (Empire Books, 1982), the first book-length biography of Mailer; valuable for its interviews with several of his wives and many friends and acquaintances, though pioneering rather than definitive.
Mailer: A Biography by Hilary Mills (Empire Books, mid-November 1982), the first book-length biography of Mailer. Its value lies in its interviews — with several of his wives, including his first, Beatrice Silverman, and with a wide range of friends and acquaintances: Jean Malaquais, Scott Meredith, George Plimpton, Dwight Macdonald, Mickey Knox, John W. Aldridge, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Jason Epstein, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Pete Hamill, Milton Greene, Jimmy Breslin, William and Rose Styron, Norman Podhoretz, Willie Morris, Abbie Hoffman, Buzz Farbar, and José Torres, among many others. Mills also incorporates her own interview with Mailer (82.23 passim; see 81.2).
The book contains little new material from Mailer himself but many important perspectives from family and friends. Lennon’s register judges Mills “fair, but not always accurate or alive to nuance,” her documentation “sometimes difficult to follow,” yet her “pioneering biography … foundational.”
Related pages
- Hilary Mills | Beatrice Silverman | “Creators on Creating” (81.2) | 1982
- Creators on Creating: Norman Mailer (81.2) | Mailer's Flight to Ancient Egypt (83.31) | Modern Evenings: An Interview with Norman Mailer (83.50) | Mailer Muses on Marriage and Updike (84.5)
- Mailer: A Biography (82.23)