Norman Mailer: Works and Days (revised edition)
J. Michael and Donna Pedro Lennon's bio-bibliography of Norman Mailer — the revised and expanded edition (2018), co-edited by Jerry Lucas, who was instrumental in bringing it to publication. It enlarges the 1,110 entries of the 2000 first edition by roughly 360 and extends the record through 2016. It is the foundational source of this digital project, which is its successor.
Norman Mailer: Works and Days, by J. Michael Lennon and Donna Pedro Lennon, is the comprehensive bio-bibliography of Mailer’s career: a chronological register of his published work (the “Works”) set alongside a chronology of his life (the “Days”). This revised and expanded edition (2018) was co-edited by Jerry Lucas, who was also instrumental in bringing it to publication — building on the 2000 first edition (Sligo Press) and on the pioneering compilations of Robert F. Lucid, Laura Adams, and Thomas Fiske.
What the volume contains
The revision enlarges the 1,110 entries of the 2000 first edition by roughly 360 — about 1,470 in all — extending coverage through 2016 and correcting the earlier record. Its structure:
- Works register. Every significant Mailer utterance in print in English, each item numbered chronologically within its year on the
YY.Nscheme (e.g.,48.2for The Naked and the Dead). Items newly inserted between two existing entries take a letter suffix (48.2a) — more than 150 such new sub-entries for the years 1941–1998 alone. Successive variants are separately numbered and their changes described (The Naked and the Dead appears as48.2,79.36, and98.6). Mailer’s invented categories — article-interview and article — sit beside novel, poem, play, essay, short story, interview, and nonfiction narrative. - Days. A year-by-year chronology of the chief events of Mailer’s life.
- Apparatus. A select secondary bibliography, several appendices, a photograph or illustration for most years from 1941 to 2016, and the roughly 1,500 internal cross-references that are the work’s connective tissue. The Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed.) is its guide.
- Exclusions (named explicitly): non-English-language items, unpublished writings, audio and video material (though original Internet items are kept), blurbs for other writers’ books, jointly-signed letters to the editor, ephemera and gossip-column quotation, drawings and sheet music; only first U.S. and U.K. editions and significant reprints are listed.
It is, as Lennon writes, “first of all a primary bibliography, one that attempts to be comprehensive. It fails” — and serves “both (overlapping) groups” of scholarly readers and book collectors.
Mailer’s preface, and Lennon’s introduction
The volume carries Mailer’s own preface (written for the 2000 edition, reprinted here), a tribute to Lennon as his “pro bono archivist” — “Three cheers for my friend, Mike Lennon, and my own private ovation for Works and Days.” In his introduction Lennon catches Mailer’s restlessness in a sentence — “Mailer is Proteus. Perhaps no career in American literature has been at once so brilliant, varied, controversial, improvisational, public, productive, lengthy and misunderstood” — and states the book’s aim in the very terms this digital edition has taken as its own: to “nominate, delineate, annotate and cross-reference every significant Mailer utterance in print in English (an impossible task worth attempting), as well as the chief events of his life.”
The source of this project
This page is, deliberately, self-referential. Norman Mailer: Works and Days (2018 edition) is the source edition from which the present digital project descends: it is named in the original-source field of nearly every Lennon-derived page in this archive, and its numbered YY.N entries are preserved here as legacy-ids. Recording the founding document within the archive it founded is a matter of provenance — the catalogue cataloguing itself. (See About this project for the full lineage and the 2026 editorial succession, under which Jerry Lucas continues the Works and Days edition.)
Related pages
- 2018 | J. Michael Lennon | Gerald R. Lucas | Preface to Norman Mailer: Works and Days | About this project