The Naked and the Read: Inside the Library of Norman Mailer
J. Michael Lennon's essay "The Naked and the Read: Inside the Library of Norman Mailer," published in The Times Literary Supplement on 9 March 2018 — a guided tour of Mailer's roughly 7,000-volume working library and what it reveals about his reading and craft. A secondary (about-Mailer) entry by the project's founding editor; recorded with kind `about`. The full text is held, rights-pending, at The Naked and the Read (full text).
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
J. Michael Lennon. “The Naked and the Read: Inside the Library of Norman Mailer.” The Times Literary Supplement, 9 March 2018, “American Literature,” pp. 6–7. (Headline a pun on The Naked and the Dead; the print page carries a photograph captioned “Norman Mailer’s home library, Brooklyn Heights, New York, 2011.”) The author reprints the full essay — under the subtitle “Norman Mailer’s Library,” with three photographs by Donna Pedro Lennon — at jmichaellennon.com, “with permission from Times Literary Supplement.”
Written by Mailer’s authorized biographer and archivist (see J. Michael Lennon), this essay reconstructs Mailer’s personal library — “more than 7,000 volumes” across four locations, which his last wife Norris Church called “Kudzu” — and argues that it was “assembled over the decades to meet his need for models, reference material, to replenish his toolbox of tropes and techniques … in short, out of literary need” (Lennon 2018, TLS). Lennon, who catalogued the libraries with his wife, opens with the daily ritual at the “scarred table” in Provincetown where Mailer sorted his mail and books, and recounts Mailer’s striking indifference to books as objects: he tore pages from first editions for public readings, shucked dust jackets, and dog-eared pages “twice diagonally.”
What the library reveals
The essay is organized as a walk through Mailer’s shelves and the reading behind the work:
- Favourite authors. Across seven published surveys Mailer most often named Dos Passos (all seven), Tolstoy, Spengler, Thomas Wolfe and Marx, then Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Hemingway and James T. Farrell; the only English author listed twice was E. M. Forster (Lennon 2018, TLS).
- The French. A large holding of French novelists — Stendhal (his favourite novel, Le Rouge et le noir), Proust, Flaubert, Huysmans, and over 200 Simenon novels he numbered to reread in order. Jean Malaquais, who “had more influence on my mind than anyone I ever knew,” led him to Gide; André Malraux was a model for the writer as engagé intellectual.
- The British. Admiration mixed with reservation — Forster (“had a developed view of the world; I did not”), and his best-loved British novelist, Graham Greene; Orwell’s 1949 praise of The Naked and the Dead as “the best war book of the last war yet” rode on the novel’s paperbacks for decades.
- Dostoevsky, history, and ideas. The Idiot and Crime and Punishment shadow An American Dream; large collections on Hitler and Nazi Germany (feeding The Castle in the Forest) and on the Kennedy assassination (two sets of the Warren Commission Report); works by Freud, Jung, and Wilhelm Reich; and the psychologist Robert Lindner, Mailer’s friend, who gave feedback on the 1954–55 “Lipton’s” journal — later published as Lipton’s, A Marijuana Journal (2024).
Lennon closes on a resonant detail: among Mailer’s philosophy books was Walter Kaufmann’s anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956), which Mailer read during the seventeen days he was confined at Bellevue after stabbing his wife — “the lonely reader in the violent ward” likely meeting Nietzsche’s injunction to “live dangerously” (Lennon 2018, TLS).
Provenance of the library
Lennon notes that about 1,200 reference books and numerous foreign editions went with Mailer’s archive to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 2005; after his death in 2007 the remainder was donated to the Norman Mailer Center (Lennon 2018, TLS).
A note on this entry
A secondary entry by a founding editor, recorded with kind about. Because the editor asked for the full text, the complete article is transcribed at the full-text page (from the author’s lightly corrected reprint), which carries an explicit rights: REQUEST-NEEDED declaration: the piece is © the Times Literary Supplement and J. Michael Lennon. Lennon — this project’s founding editor — already reprints it on his own site “with permission from Times Literary Supplement,” so clearance for this edition’s own public display should be short to obtain, but it is not yet secured; the text is held in the working archive for scholarly use. Like other post-2016 additions it carries no legacy-id (see About this project).
Related pages
- 2018-03-09-naked-and-the-read | The Naked and the Dead | J. Michael Lennon | Lipton's, A Marijuana Journal | Robert Lindner | Jean Malaquais | About this project