How Norman Mailer Changed the Face of Biography
Robert Dean Lurie's essay reappraising Mailer as a biographer, centered on Marilyn, Oswald's Tale, and Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, with comment from J. Michael Lennon, Susan Mailer, and Carl Rollyson. An about-Mailer clipping.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
Robert Dean Lurie. “How Norman Mailer Changed the Face of Biography.” The Spectator, 26 December 2024 (print: January 2025 World edition). https://spectator.com/article/how-norman-mailer-changed-the-face-of-biography/
An argument that biography is Mailer’s underrated late mode. Lurie centers the two books that appeared months apart thirty years earlier — Oswald’s Tale (1995) and Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (1995) — and reaches back to Marilyn (1973), describing Mailer’s “method biography” (the term he used to Henry Miller after Genius and Lust): a first-person-plural collaboration with the reader, openly speculative about a subject’s inner life. He quotes J. Michael Lennon (“Mailer became a major biographer in the last half of his career”), Susan Mailer, Carl Rollyson, and notes Stephen King’s use of Oswald’s Tale as a source for 11/22/63. The full text is held in the working archive (rights not yet cleared); see How Norman Mailer Changed the Face of Biography under texts.
Related pages
- Marilyn: A Biography | Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery | Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography
- Robert Dean Lurie | Carl Rollyson
- About this project