Mailer's Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature
J. Michael Lennon's Mailer's Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature (Etruscan Press, 2022) — a collection of essays, memoir, and criticism gathered from the half-century of Lennon's life in letters. Mailer, Lennon's biographical subject and "literary pater familias," is one of its central figures, set beside Lennon's own father and a gallery of postwar writers. As a book about Mailer written by one of this project's founding editors, it is recorded in the register with kind `about`.
J. Michael Lennon. Mailer’s Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature. Wilkes-Barre, PA: Etruscan Press, 15 November 2022. 312 pp., paperback. ISBN 978-1-7364946-5-3.
A collection of personal and literary reminiscences, essays, and “investigations” drawn from the last half-century of Lennon’s career as critic, biographer, archivist, and teacher. The book is a hybrid of memoir, literary criticism, and biography: “Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon’s remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius”. Those two paternal figures — Mailer the “adopted father” and Lennon’s own distant father — are, in the publisher’s phrase and the reviewers’ agreement, the book’s “true heart.”
Mailer’s place in the book
Mailer is one of the collection’s principal subjects. Lennon, who was Mailer’s archivist, close friend, and authorized biographer (Norman Mailer: A Double Life, 2013; Selected Letters of Norman Mailer, 2014; and, with Mailer, On God: An Uncommon Conversation, 2007), frames the whole volume around his decades inside Mailer’s life and work. Robert J. Begiebing’s jacket note captures the structure: the essays open “a wide window on the post-war American literary scene, framed by Mailer’s astonishing career,” and “beneath it all, beats the book’s true heart: Lennon’s pursuit of his own distant father and his ‘adopted father’ — Norman Mailer”. Alongside Mailer, the collection treats James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, James Jones, Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Ezra Pound, Robert Stone, Gore Vidal, and Muhammad Ali, among others.
Reception
The book gathers praise from across Mailer studies and beyond. Jay Parini calls it “delicious… not easy to stop eating once you start.” Susan Mailer — Mailer’s daughter and author of the memoir In Another Place: With and Without My Father — describes it as “an exciting blend of literary genres… a master class in American and English Literature with poignant episodes of his own life.” Nancy McKinley and Maggie McKinley, Beverly Donofrio, Charles J. Shields, and Jonathan Eig (Ali: A Life) supply further jacket notes; Eig praises “a collection that packs the emotion of a memoir and the insight of literary criticism… moving portraits of two powerful writers and the intersection of their lives”. Several of these endorsers recur across the project’s recent secondary holdings (Susan Mailer co-edited Lipton’s, A Marijuana Journal; Begiebing and the McKinleys are active Mailer scholars).
The author
J. Michael Lennon is Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University and Chair of the Editorial Board of The Mailer Review. He is the author or editor of several books about Mailer, including Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013), Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (2014), and On God: An Uncommon Conversation (2007, co-authored with Mailer). He co-founded the Maslow Family Graduate Creative Writing Program at Wilkes University in 2005, and his work has appeared in the Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, and The Mailer Review, among others. With Donna Pedro Lennon, he compiled the print Norman Mailer: Works and Days (2000; revised 2018) on which this project is founded; see J. Michael Lennon.
A note on this entry
This is the first secondary entry in Works and Days authored by one of the project’s founding editors — a book about Mailer written by his biographer rather than by Mailer himself. In the bibliography it is recorded with kind about. Like other post-2016 additions it carries no legacy-id (see About this project). The listing price observed at capture was $9.50 (Amazon, new), which appears to be a discounted offer rather than the publisher’s list price; the price field is left blank pending confirmation.
Related pages
- J. Michael Lennon | Etruscan Press | Lipton's, A Marijuana Journal | Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer | About this project