Mailer: His Life and Times
Peter Manso's Mailer: His Life and Times (Simon and Schuster, 1985), the second book-length biography of Mailer and the major oral biography — built from original interviews with 151 people. Strong on the range of testimony, weak, in Lennon's view, on editorial synthesis; the life crowds out the work.
Mailer: His Life and Times, by Peter Manso (Simon and Schuster, 1985) — the second book-length biography of Mailer, after Hilary Mills’s of 1982, and the major oral biography. Manso, who had earlier edited Running Against the Machine (1969) out of Mailer’s 1969 mayoral campaign, built the book almost entirely from original interviews: 151 individuals are identified in its “Contributors” section — Mailer himself, his family, friends, enemies, wives, and lovers, many of them never interviewed before or since. It includes a partial Mailer family tree, excerpts from reviews of many of his books, some of his letters to his Arkansas army friend Francis Irby “Fig” Gwaltney, a detailed index, and scores of photographs from every period of his life.
Lennon’s register weighs it candidly: its strength is “the wide range and number of utterances on Mailer’s life”; its weakness “the paucity of editorial synthesis and perspective,” so that “Mailer’s work is scanted in favor of his life.” The friendship between Manso and Mailer later soured, and Manso would publish a far more hostile memoir, Mailer: His Life and Times having been the high-water mark of their collaboration.
Related pages
- Peter Manso | Simon and Schuster | Mailer: A Biography (Mills, 82.23) | Francis Irby "Fig" Gwaltney
- 1985