A Hundred Years of Norman Mailer
Ronald K. Fried's centennial-day interview with J. Michael Lennon in The Millions (31 January 2023), occasioned by Lennon's Mailer's Last Days. Lennon assesses Mailer's posthumous standing, names The Armies of the Night the likeliest survivor, and is candid about the 1960 stabbing. An about-Mailer clipping.
Ronald K. Fried. “A Hundred Years of Norman Mailer.” The Millions, 31 January 2023.
A centennial-day interview with J. Michael Lennon, occasioned by his Mailer’s Last Days. Lennon handicaps Mailer’s posthumous standing (the “Blessed Isles of Posthumous Investiture” thirty years on), argues that The Armies of the Night is the book most likely to last, traces the influence of Doctorow’s Ragtime and DeLillo’s Libra on Mailer’s documentary fiction (and on Oswald’s Tale), and is candid about the 1960 stabbing of Adele Morales (“Mailer got off lightly”). Useful chiefly as a compact statement of the biographer’s view at the centenary.
Related pages
- Mailer's Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature | The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History | Ronald K. Fried | J. Michael Lennon | About this project