Of a Fire on the Moon
by Norman Mailer · 2 Jun 2014 · 477pp · 165,458 words
Praise for Norman Mailer “Norman Mailer loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.” —The New York Times “A writer of the greatest and most
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it did for a while, and Mailer’s book charts it breathlessly, dramatically.” —Spike Magazine 2014 Random House Trade Paperbacks Edition Copyright © 1969, 1970 by Norman Mailer All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a
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his indebtedness to First on the Moon by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., for the field of quotation it offered. By Norman Mailer The Naked and the Dead Barbary Shore The Deer Park Advertisements for Myself Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters) The Presidential Papers An American
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? Modest Gifts The Castle in the Forest On God (with J. Michael Lennon) Mind of an Outlaw About the Author Born in Brooklyn in 1923, NORMAN MAILER was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the 20th century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He
The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer · 20 Jul 2010 · 879pp · 272,328 words
few pages. Allow me then to suppose that there is a good deal of hope to be found if one reads all of its pages. Norman Mailer PART ONE Wave 1 NOBODY COULD sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the
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Harry Link. Copyright, 1935, by Bourne, Inc., and used with their permission. THE NAKED AND THE DEAD. Copyright © 1948, renewed in 1976, by Norman Mailer. Introduction copyright © 1998 by Norman Mailer. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
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. Phone: 1-800-221-7945 extension 763 Fax: 212-677-7456 E-mail: trademarketing@stmartins.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mailer, Norman The naked and the dead / Norman Mailer.—50th anniversary ed. p. cm. ISBN 0-312-26505-0 I. Title. PS3525.A4152N34 1998 813'.54—dc21 98-6700 CIP First
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
by Marc Weingarten · 12 Dec 2006 · 363pp · 123,076 words
impose some order on all of this American mayhem, each in his or her own distinctive manner (a few old hands, like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, chipped in as well). They came to tell us stories about ourselves in ways that we couldn’t, stories about the way life was being
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slippery phrase. When Tom Wolfe made it the title of a 1973 anthology featuring pieces from such writers as Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, and others, he meant it to be a declaration of independence from any journalism that had preceded it. But there were others—particularly the New
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’s best writer of profiles. Now the editor would turn the preeminent novelist of his generation into a magazine journalist. Felker’s first encounter with Norman Mailer transpired at the Five Spot on Fifty-second Street during a performance by pianist Thelonious Monk. “Mailer was with his wife, Adele, there had been
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I. F. Stone, to speak out against the war and thus generate big media coverage. The first name on Rubin’s list of speakers was Norman Mailer. Rubin’s fellow members on the Vietnam Day Committee, particularly the New Left contingent, vehemently objected. For one thing, Mailer was too controversial, a poor
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that “there was a part of me that knew he would have lost his effectiveness if he’d become a Yippie. Norman was better being Norman Mailer.” Mailer didn’t go to Washington with a specific magazine assignment, but when he returned to New York it occurred to him that there was
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it was terrible.” After attempting a number of approaches, Mailer as a last resort tried the third person; the “I” would become a character called Norman Mailer. Even then, he wasn’t confident that it was the right way, but it carried him deeper into the story than he had managed thus
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Cezanne and say to himself, ‘That’s the way to do it.’” “On the one hand, it seemed interesting to speak of a protagonist named Norman Mailer,” he said. “On the other, it was odd. It’s a very funny way to look at oneself.” The third-person technique liberated Mailer from
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’t a patrician trying to act like a regular Joe. He really was the guy he wrote about.” In the winter of 1969, Breslin and Norman Mailer made a quixotic bid for public office. The idea had germinated at an after-hours story meeting with Felker, Peter Maas, Gloria Steinem, and Jimmy
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in fourth in a field of five. (Incumbent mayor Lindsay was reelected.) The final result, for Breslin, was more welcome relief than a disappointment. “After Norman Mailer and I finished seven weeks of a mayoralty campaign adjudged unlikely, I still came away nervous and depressed by what I had seen of my
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mediocrity and deceit at the highest levels of government. As journalists who had engaged in bids for public office on fairly radical platforms, Thompson and Norman Mailer, who was covering the campaign for Life, had little tolerance for mainstream politics. But while Mailer’s experience had convinced him to stick to his
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New Hampshire primary. “He lacks that sense of drama—that instinct for timing and orchestration that is the real secret of success in American politics.” Norman Mailer had a less charitable view of McGovern. Mailer shared Thompson’s opinion of McGovern as a decent and principled politician, but virtue was not enough
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, and the My Lai massacre until his death from cancer in 2004. Joan Didion remains a giant of journalism and continues to produce stunning work. Norman Mailer also retreated from print journalism but didn’t give up the practice entirely. The Executioner’s Song, his epic about Utah killer Gary Gilmore, was
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book was Advertisements”: Hilary Mills, Mailer: A Biography (New York: Empire Books, 1982), 194. “He had the deep orange-brown suntan”;“Eisenhower’s eight years”: Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermart,”Esquire, November 1960. “enormously personalized journalism”: Mills, Mailer, 195. “a more active control of all our materials”: Hayes memo to
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”: Willie Morris, New York Days (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 211. “Mailer has grown”: Manso, Mailer, 454. Page 178 “There had been all too many years”: Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History (New York: Plume, 1994), 8. “helps you to think better”: Richard Copans
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and Stan Neumann, Mailer on Mailer, American Masters documentary (New York: Thirteen/WNET, Reciprocal Films, Films d’lci & France 2, 2000). “[L]isten, Lyndon Johnson”: Norman Mailer, The Time of Our Time (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 551. “He knew that by telling everyone”: Manso, Mailer, 408. “Three cheers, lads”: Ibid. “A
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Communist bureaucrat”: Mailer, The Time of Our Time, 553. “under the yoke”: Ibid., 540. “hit the longest ball in American letters”: Seymour Krim, “Norman Mailer, Get Out of My Head!”New York, April 21, 1969. “Moving from one activity to another”: Paul Carroll, “The Playboy Interview
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: Norman Mailer,”Playboy, January 1968. “transmute myself”: Norman Mailer, Pontifications (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 176. “Mailer received such news”: Mailer, Armies, 9. “Mitch, I’ll be there”: Ibid. “kind of up in the air
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deal”: Ibid., 214-15. Given the ambitious scope: Manso, Mailer, 463. “written in a towering depression”: Mailer, Pontifications, 152. “I remember thinking at the time”: Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing (New York: Random House, 2003), 99. “On the one hand …”: Mailer, Pontifications, 153. “true protagonist…”: Ibid., 153. “The
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was on the top of the ticket: Jimmy Breslin, “I Run to Win,” New York, May 5, 1969. “I wanted to make actions”: Steven Marcus, “Norman Mailer,” Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 3rd Series (New York: Penguin, 1979), 278. Background of the Mailer-Breslin campaign: Manso, Mailer; Peter Manso, ed
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Run to Win.” “I’d piss on it”: Jimmy Breslin, I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 121. “After Norman Mailer and I finished”: Jimmy Breslin, “And Furthermore, I Promise,”New York, June 16, 1969. “A wistful Republican malaise”: Julie Baumgold, “Going Private: Life in the
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Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, 403-4. “I am growing extremely weary”: Ibid., 219. “a shallow, contemptible”: Ibid., 209. “that same void of charisma”: Norman Mailer, St. George and the Godfather (New York: Arbor House, 1983), 23. “complacent innocence”: Ibid., 33. “Phi Beta Kappas”: Ibid., 66. “a bland drone”: Ibid., 177
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’ is not quite the right word”: Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, 417-18. “Richard Nixon is one …”: Mailer, “A Conversation Between Norman Mailer and John Ehrlichmann,”Chic, December 1976. 13. VULGARIAN AT THE GATE Background of the takeover of New York by Rupert Murdoch: Sheehy, “A Fistful of
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. Knopf, New York 1986). London, Jack. The People of the Abyss (e-book #1688, transcribed from the Thomas Nelson and Sons edition, 2005), p. 1. Mailer, Norman. Pontifications (Little, Brown, Boston 1982). _____. St. George and the Godfather (Arbor House, New York 1983). _____. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the
Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight
by Margaret Lazarus Dean · 18 May 2015 · 338pp · 112,127 words
to touch the clouds. —Oriana Fallaci, If the Sun Dies The most important events in America seemed to take place in all the lonely spaces. —Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon Cape Canaveral was in Florida, but not any part of Florida you would write home about. —Tom Wolfe,
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This New Ocean, Diane Vaughan’s The Challenger Launch Decision, Oriana Fallaci’s If the Sun Dies, Michael Collins’s Carrying the Fire, and Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon. Each of these books offers different layers of the infinitely layered story—Wolfe’s bombastic lionizing of the
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same time the innovators in Houston and Huntsville and the Cape were redefining what machines were capable of, what human beings were capable of. Norman Mailer’s book is about witnessing the launch of Apollo 11—Life magazine had commissioned him to go to the Cape to write about the launch
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exchange for a sum of money rumored to be somewhere between extraordinary and obscene. I hadn’t known, before I came across it, that Norman Mailer had written a book about Apollo 11—I knew him for having written the best-selling novel The Naked and the Dead, for cofounding the
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Life, and the book that subsequently expanded on it, are both ungainly wandering things with oceans of technical details and self-conscious linguistic tics. Norman Mailer could never quite get both arms around the subject, but he tries in a way that few have, and I witness in his very struggle
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so spectacularly. When I read all these books, I’m encountering other minds struggling with the same questions while walking the same landscape. With Norman Mailer especially, the only one of the three to undertake to describe a launch, I feel as though he and I are tugging on opposite ends
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same thread, a thread forty years long. I am often struck with jealousy for the era he lived in. Sometimes it seems as though Norman Mailer’s generation got to see the beginnings of things and mine has gotten the ends. Juan Ponce de León stumbled across Cape Canaveral in 1513
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of the building disappear, too small to make out, even though we are all in the same room. In his book about Apollo 11, Norman Mailer wrote that the Vehicle Assembly Building may be the ugliest building in the world from the outside, but that from the inside it was a
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unfit for serious discussion. Grown men, perfectly normal-looking, were now going to talk about their trip to the moon. It made everyone uncomfortable. —Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon CHAPTER 2. What It Felt Like to Walk on the Moon Southern Festival of Books: Nashville, Tennessee, October 10
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a tough question for the millionth time. But taken literally, it means something quite startling. It means that Buzz Aldrin envies Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and Oriana Fallaci, that—even more ludicrous—he envies me. Yet the thing we space writers have in common is the extent to which we
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of rocket science, and it had included the observation that, from an engineering standpoint, there are no real differences between rockets, fireworks, and bombs. Norman Mailer’s description of the launch of Apollo 11 compares the light of launch to “the most beautiful of fireworks.” The “firework” song is not about
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more than anything else. Insiders know that scrubs are part of spaceflight. While I wait, I read from Of a Fire on the Moon. Norman Mailer gripes about being packed into buses with the other journalists, all of them sweating through their shirts and ties, smoking and cursing the brutal Florida
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of a shirt and tie I wear a sundress, a beach hat, and enormous sunglasses that I hope make me look like Joan Didion. When Norman Mailer gets off the bus at the Press Site, he recounts his impressions (in the third person) of feeling slightly disconnected from the events happening
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clear blue sky. They will monitor the weather up until the moment of launch. Today six Americans are going to space. Forty-two years ago, Norman Mailer woke up in a motel in Cocoa Beach, Florida, after two hours of sleep and drove to the Kennedy Space Center. He felt cranky,
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out of sorts, and hot. Too many other Very Important Persons had turned out for the launch, and Norman Mailer disliked them both individually and as a group. But in the moments right before liftoff, he had an insight: He knew now why he was
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of those things the space program has given us that is hard to put a value on. The night before the launch of Apollo 11, Norman Mailer visited sites where tourists had gathered to watch the launch—maybe this very spot, he doesn’t specify. He describes the people he saw
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man all faded high-school glory and physical work and beer belly, the woman all aging sass and sexuality. I can only imagine that if Norman Mailer had watched the actual launch from here among everyday Americans, rather than from the NASA Press Site surrounded by credentialed journalists, he and the
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Nonfiction, in which we spend a few weeks reading Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, John McPhee, Hunter S. Thompson, James Agee, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer—important writers who were working in that moment in the sixties when literary journalism converged with a thread of creative writing and the genre we
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small: astronauts, engineers, gas station attendants, astronauts’ wives, reporters, even chimpanzees being trained for spaceflight. For Mailer, the only real character in the book is Norman Mailer; even the astronauts are there only as archetypes upon which to project his own ideas about himself. I look over the pages of Mailer’s
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. What are some places in The Right Stuff where he chose not to do that?” But as we go on discussing Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and the New Journalism and the way in the sixties everyone thought they were reinventing everything, the optimism embodied in redefining literature once and for
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those who were there, the only sign of Columbia’s demise was its absence. Columbia was supposed to land that morning, and simply did not. Norman Mailer says of the Apollo astronauts, operating with the risk of their own deaths, “Like all good professional athletes, they had the modesty of knowing
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him what the space shuttle means to him, how he feels about this era coming to an end. But I don’t press. Neither did Norman Mailer, incidentally—he only rarely reports asking a direct question of a specific person. We could chalk this up to laziness, or to an understanding
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ghost galleon of the Caribbean! The beginning of the trip to the moon was as slow as the fall of the fullest flake of snow. —Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon CHAPTER 6. A Brief History of Spacefarers STS-135 Rollout: May 31, 2011 When the Kennedy Space Center
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against the black sky of night. We want pictures that show our own faces only so that we can tell people that we were here. Norman Mailer’s description of the rollout compares the slowly moving launch vehicle to a “ghost galleon of the Caribbean.” I’ve always thought that description
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the morning, he would be up by four. An early start was necessary, for traffic on the road to the Press Site would be heavy. —Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon CHAPTER 7. Good-bye, Atlantis STS-135: July 8, 2011 A million visitors are expected to descend on
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burst into tears of relief at my computer. The Press Site is closer to the launchpad than I’ve ever been: the site from which Norman Mailer watched the launch of Apollo 11, the site from which Walter Cronkite narrated the moon landings, the site from which all the space journalists
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it will be snatched up unapologetically. This does not preclude a sense of friendliness or collegiality, however. While I wait, I look again at what Norman Mailer wrote about his wait in this place: It is country beaten by the wind and water … unspectacular country, uninhabited by men in normal times
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that rumble reverberates everywhere, against the VAB, against the countdown clock, against Walter Cronkite’s CBS building and all the others, against the trees in Norman Mailer’s jungle, against our very hearts and bodies, against the hearts and bodies of those watching with us. “Max Q,” speaks the voice of
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slave laborers to build his rockets. We remember Juan Ponce as an explorer, a man of courage and conviction. Like Wernher von Braun, like Norman Mailer, like Captain James Cook and the other ruthless men whose stories I have learned, Ponce de León believed that the vision in his mind was
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will be ten to fifteen years before NASA launches its next human spaceflight. Pessimists say that yesterday’s launch was the last for all history. Norman Mailer doesn’t mention having visited the Visitor Complex; if he had, I’m sure his comments would have been about how fat and sweaty
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common. Maybe he would have enjoyed the Rocket Garden, the simplicity of its implied phallic rhetoric: Look at these rockets. These rockets are awesome. Norman Mailer admired the mettle of the astronauts and the technological achievement of the moon shot, yet he never gave up questioning the effort and expense—again
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’s funeral speech from Julius Caesar: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” Maybe Oriana Fallaci’s moment was an even rarer one than Norman Mailer’s, because of scrub conditions, because of the pre-Apollo 11 pace, and because of her gender. A moment when a writer could breeze through
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am also the only woman here. As the bus grinds through its gears, I realize that it is something like the converted school bus that Norman Mailer rode for Apollo 11. Rather than being completely un-air-conditioned, as Mailer complained his was, this bus does have air-conditioning—at least
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that idea has been demonstrably false. But on the morning of the launch of Apollo 11, even the gruffest, most cynical of Americans, even Norman Mailer himself, could inhabit that optimism for a moment. For that moment, he thought it might be true that the achievement of going to the moon
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the voyages of Ponce de León. A shuttle development stack, an eighties-and-nineties shuttle stack, a Challenger disaster stack, a Columbia disaster stack. A Norman Mailer stack, his self-referential meditations on topics that always just eluded his understanding, like feminism or the Vietnam War or Hitler or Marilyn Monroe. But
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me. It will never move again. Good-bye, Discovery. When he came back from covering the moon landing and finished writing his space book, Norman Mailer embarked on an experiment. He rented a house in Maine and spent part of the summer there with five of his six children to demonstrate
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, had just left him, claiming that her career as an actress had been buried under the domestic work necessary to let Norman Mailer go out into the world and be Norman Mailer. Though the original challenge was to show he could do everything himself, Mailer almost immediately hired a local woman to do
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the Mercury astronauts—had this freedom; they also had wives and children who carried on without them with varying degrees of success. This admission of Norman Mailer’s does not carry the power of transformation, or even of any type of insight, because he attributes his freedom to the biological fact that
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launch of Apollo 11, the press corps was taken around to visit the wives of the three astronauts then on their way to the moon. Norman Mailer found Jan Armstrong appealing in a plain and hardworking way; Pat Collins he found unremarkable. But Joan Aldrin he found quite captivating. He didn’
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his own wife. Mailer couldn’t have known that Buzz and Joan Aldrin were to divorce, just like Beverly and himself, shortly after. What would Norman Mailer think of me, a mother and wife, following in his footsteps at Kennedy? If time could fold back upon itself, if he and I
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professional collaboration and respect, intellectual rapport, gossip, comfort, advice, simple favors one friend does for another, games of online Scrabble. As much as I envy Norman Mailer the events he got to take part in, I can’t really envy him his era. He and I never could have been friends in
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dead center ahead of us, as the Apollo and shuttle launchpads were, but off to the right, almost hidden behind the foliage making up Norman Mailer’s jungle. I learn I’ve been looking in the wrong direction only when I hear some NASASocial people point out the launchpad to each
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have been set up for all the writers who have written about the American space program, though most of the chairs appear to be empty. Norman Mailer is sitting next to me, which makes me faintly nervous. I can also make out Tom Wolfe, Jay Barbree, J. G. Ballard, Lynn Sherr,
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2010. Launius, Roger D., and Howard E. McCurdy, eds. Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Lennon, J. Michael. Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. Lipartito, Kenneth, and Orville R. Butler. A History of the Kennedy Space Center. Gainesville: University Press of
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, past and present. Your work made something beautiful come true. May it never be forgotten. JUDGE’S AFTERWORD Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer’s 1970 account of the Apollo 11 moon landing, was the first book I “covered” as a freshman arts reporter for my student newspaper, the
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analysis of the mysterious reverberations of the event for himself, his family, his friends, the nation. There were numerous characters inside the psychic playhouse of Norman Mailer, but at the podium of Sanders Theatre his stance was magisterial—a dazzle of science, history, art, politics, and Manichaeism—his command subtly disconcerting to
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Updike). As early on Dean focuses what she tags the “heroic” versus the “shuttle” eras of spaceflight, she confesses her “jealousy” of Mailer: With Norman Mailer, especially … I feel as though he and I are tugging on opposite ends of the same thread, a thread forty years long. I am often
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struck with jealousy for the era he lived in. Sometimes it seems as though Norman Mailer’s generation got to see the beginning of things and mine has gotten the ends. From the outset she frames her own project via his
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Moon while she waits among the Florida throngs for Discovery to take off, and, whenever possible, correlates notes. “In his book about Apollo 11, Norman Mailer wrote that the Vehicle Assembly Building may be the ugliest building in the world from the outside,” she recalls, “but that from the inside it
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gender and class. The gifted writer of Leaving Orbit also steadily positions herself as a mother, wife, and teacher. “This is an important difference between Norman Mailer and me,” she says, “when Mailer went off to Cape Canaveral and Houston, for as long as he pleased, he left behind five children
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set up for all the writers who have written about the American space program,” she recounts, “though most of the chairs appear to be empty. Norman Mailer is sitting next to me, which makes me faintly nervous. I can also make out Tom Wolfe, Jay Barbree, J. G. Ballard, Lynn Sherr,
Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears
, country doctors with pockets full of paper pills. This was the Anderson who inspired several generations of American writers, including William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and Norman Mailer. But the one work that truly resonated with a popular audience was Dark Laughter (1924), his only bestseller. The novel told the story of a
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the world of universities and foundations. Only a very few participants registered any dissent from the roseate views of the majority. One of them was Norman Mailer, who declared that he was “in almost total disagreement with the assumptions of this symposium,” and insisted on the value of an oppositional stance, rather
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familiar melodrama of beleaguered masculinity. But as the Vietnam War provoked new varieties of countercultural protest, his perspective broadened and deepened. MANHOOD AT MID-CENTURY: NORMAN MAILER Mailer had first won notice in 1946, with his great war novel The Naked and the Dead. It captured the futility, stupidity, and brutality of
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York) Herman Kahn. Photograph by Thomas J. O’Halloran, 1965 (U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division) Norman Mailer, writer, gliding. Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd, 1967 (Bernard Gotfryd photograph collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division) Notes The page numbers for the notes
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”: Oskar Morgenstern, cited in Erickson et al., How Reason, 48. “a cool and clear-headed”: Sidney Verba, cited in ibid., 83. “in almost total disagreement”: Norman Mailer, contribution to “Our Country and Our Culture,” Partisan Review (May–June 1952), 298–301. “there is slowly emerging”: Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture
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, “Real Cuban Missile Crisis,” 3. “the peace and security”: Kennedy, television address to the nation, Oct. 22, 1962, cited in ibid. “The furnishings are functional”: Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (Signet Books ed., 1968), 25–26, 27. “If the republic was now”: Mailer, Armies, 110, 103. “a purely negative”: Theodore
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Macdonald, Dwight Macdonough, A. R. Machiavelli, Niccolo MacKay, Charles Macrery, Joseph Madison, James Madison Square Garden Magic Staff, The (Davis) magnetism; see also animal magnetism Mailer, Norman Makari, George Making of a Counterculture, A (Roszak) mana management, see technocratic rationality Man and Superman (Shaw) Mandeville, Bernard Manhattan Project manhood, see masculinity manitou
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein · 1 Jan 2008 · 1,351pp · 404,177 words
wasn’t Dixie’s most effective segregationist. He was just the most theatrical. “If every politician is an actor, only a few are consummately talented,” Norman Mailer once wrote. “Wallace is talented.” Wallace pledged to sign on as Lurleen’s “adviser” at $1 a year: “I’m gonna draw the water, tote
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from the tear gas, dropping his arms for balance after a stumble, he was turned into a block of Swiss cheese. Left-wing writers including Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag released a statement on his martyrdom: “We find little fundamental difference between the assassin’s bullet which killed Dr. King and the
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that slowly truths force their way on all of us…. This book tries to describe the campaign of a man with courage and conscience.” Even Norman Mailer called Nixon “less phony.” A Nixon campaign commercial called “Convention”: A brass band, like the brass band that played over the McCarthy delegates standing on
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-striped suit that made him look as if he’d never dressed for a crowd outside of Pierre, South Dakota, heard him speak in what Norman Mailer would later describe as that “damnable gentle singsong prairie voice” (it had a hint of a lisp) and passed judgment: “This guy’s better than
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power, too. At McGovern headquarters at the famous Doral resort, the usual haunt of golfing Shriners, hordes of kids awaited their hero’s arrival “wearing,” Norman Mailer wrote, “copper bangles and spaced-out heavy eyes.” He imagined the reaction of the Democratic regulars: “Where were the bourbon and broads of yesteryear?” Not
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State University Press, 1996), 339. One sweltering day late in April: “Wallace Orders New Segregation,” NYT, April 28, 1966. “If every politician is an actor”: Norman Mailer, St. George and the Godfather (New York: New American Library, 1972), 15. “I’m gonna draw the water”: Carter, Politics of Rage, 273. Behind the
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, 1967; Thomas Maier, Dr. Spock: An American Life (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 293; Julius Lester, Revolutionary Notes (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 31–33; Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New York: Signet, 1968). The president was once again sure Moscow: Dallek, Flawed
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Illusion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 20. Theodore White: Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 21. Norman Mailer: Kutler, Wars of Watergate, 67. A Nixon campaign commercial: http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/. New York’s new Panthers: Michael Newton, Bitter Grain: Huey Newton and
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, Abuse of Power, 16. “Every moment’s continuance”: New York Times Co. v. United States, Black concurrence, 403 U.S. 713. Gravel Pentagon Papers hearing: Norman Mailer, St. George and the Godfather (New York: New American Library, 1972), 79–80; Reeves, President Nixon, 334–35; “Gravel Calls Night ‘Hearing,’ Reads Pentagon Documents
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(Chicago: Regnery, 1973), 56. “Fellas, I don’t believe”: Hoffman, Rubin, and Sanders, Vote!, 9–10. “Call me Chuck”: Ibid., 16–21. At McGovern headquarters: Norman Mailer, St. George and the Godfather (New York: New American Library, 1972), 69. Not at the Doral’s rooftop: Greene, Running, 4. Germaine Greer, the women
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and Mao: The Week That Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2007. Maier, Thomas. Dr. Spock: An American Life. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Mailer, Norman. St. George and the Godfather. New York: New American Library, 1972. Mason, Robert. Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority. Chapel Hill: University
1968: The Year That Rocked the World
by Mark Kurlansky · 30 Dec 2003 · 538pp · 164,533 words
attention during the Washington march by promising to levitate the Pentagon and exorcize it by spinning it around. He did not deliver on his promise. Norman Mailer was there and wrote about it in Armies of the Night, which was to become one of the most read and praised books of 1968
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drugs, but it was mostly a reaction to black riots in northern cities. In one of his both bizarre and typical moments of self-discovery, Norman Mailer in his 1968 book Miami and the Siege of Chicago—one of three Mailer books published that year—described waiting for a Ralph Abernathy press
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’s magazine and the Atlantic Monthly put out special Vietnam War issues. Harper’s entire March issue, on sale in February, was devoted to a Norman Mailer article about the antiwar movement that powerfully criticized U.S. policy. Atlantic Monthly’s entire March issue was devoted to a piece by Dan Wakefield
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Angeles neighborhood of Watts, he mystified everyone by comparing them to a peasant uprising in 1381. “McCarthy for President” campaign poster, 1968 (Chicago Historical Society) Norman Mailer, in describing the candidate’s faults at the campaign’s final hours in Chicago, may have hit on exactly the source of his appeal to
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and economic changes that were being ignored by the press. Among those he attracted to the organization were Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, theater critic Kenneth Tynan, and Truman Capote. The group placed high-profile ads explaining the Cuban revolution. With very little political affiliation except
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Pigs invasion also drove a wedge between the liberals and the Left, who had united for a moment in the promise of a Kennedy presidency. Norman Mailer, a prominent Kennedy supporter and chronicler, wrote in an open letter, “Wasn’t there anyone around to give you the lecture on Cuba? Don’t
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hip counterculture. Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders—who had a group called the Fugs that was named after a word used by Norman Mailer in his novel The Naked and the Dead because he could not use his F-word of choice—were all in the East Village. Hoffman
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POLITICS Yes, Nixon was still the spirit of television. Mass communication was still his disease—he thought he could use it to communicate with masses. —NORMAN MAILER, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 1968 1968 WAS AN AMERICAN election year, and election years in America tend to display a peculiar kind of
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. All the candidates, Democrats and Republicans, none so much as McCarthy, who seemed to have withdrawn from the race, knew that they could be next. Norman Mailer, who covered both party conventions, observed that all of the candidates had become uneasy-looking when in crowds. The most likely victim already dead, the
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that black representation was unfairly excluded from the delegations of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee failed to produce drama because it was quickly glossed over. Norman Mailer wrote, “The complaints were unanimous that this was the dullest convention anyone could remember.” One television critic said the coverage was so long and dull
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planning to be there, but writers were coming, too. Playwright Arthur Miller was a Connecticut delegate for McCarthy. Esquire magazine commissioned articles from William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet. Terry Southern, who had written the screenplay of the antinuclear classic Dr. Strangelove, was there, as was poet and pacifist Robert Lowell
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, had a place in the UNAM student pantheon of heroes in proximity to Che and Zapata. The Black Panthers also enjoyed some popularity at UNAM. Norman Mailer was widely read by students, as were Frantz Fanon and Camus. But, as Martínez de la Roca said, “Most important was the Cuban revolution. We
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against not only antiwar demonstrators, but black rioters as well. With each black riot, more white “law and order” voters came along, people who, like Norman Mailer, were “getting tired of Negroes and their rights.” The popular term for it was “white backlash,” and Nixon was after the backlash vote. Even that
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! But it was live.” Daniel Schorr, interviewed April 2001. 42 and playing it that night. Ibid. 43 “tides of rage must be loose in America?” Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (New York: World Publishing Company, 1968), 51. 43
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. 260 “some starving white people to feed.” The New York Times, September 30, 1968. CHAPTER 15: The Craft of Dull Politics 261 John Updike said, Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 15. 261 “Yippie! was really in trouble.” Abbie Hoffman (“Free”), Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial
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. New York: Fromm International, 1997. Lowell, Robert. The Dolphin. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. ———. For the Union Dead. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964. Mailer, Norman. Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968. New York: World Publishing Co., 1968. ———. The Armies
How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers
by Richard Cohen · 16 May 2016
distance as well as narrative voice. Some of the greatest novelists loved to experiment; from Jane Austen and Wilkie Collins through Faulkner and Kafka to Norman Mailer and Salman Rushdie (who has admitted that in Midnight’s Children he deliberately made mistakes of fact and judgment, only later to discover there were
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a re-vision. One needs to look with fresh eyes, not just do carpentry (although it sometimes is just carpentry). Balzac revised heavily, as did Norman Mailer. P. G. Wodehouse hated second drafts, while Jack Kerouac, William Golding, and John Cheever over the years had to deal with editors good, interfering, and
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technical questions for a novelist to resolve. Over my years in book publishing, I used at regular intervals to be sent the latest script by Norman Mailer, which his agent would submit to a raft of publishers hoping to drum up a large advance to help his client with his various alimony
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Punishment, for instance, requires a solitary figure at its center. It all depends on the tale one has to tell. — Such variations lead back to Norman Mailer and the most popular narrative voice in fiction. He writes: With a full use of the third person, you are God—well, of course, not
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novel, the narrator enjoys no consistent perceptual advantage: He sees the world through the same haze of subjective doubt as Raskolnikov. Francine Prose, who with Norman Mailer has provided some of the best insights into how a novelist chooses a point of view, gives this gloss: “Ultimately he [Dostoyevsky] realized that, given
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can get out of a single instrument; the result is impressive but quickly palls. The same is true with all speech mannerisms. When in 1964 Norman Mailer, who hated books that prettified the speech of ordinary life, for instance rendering “motherfucking” as “mother-loving,” published his fourth novel, An American Dream, in
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Thuringian chancelleries, thus helping shape the modern German language in a way to rival the effect on English of the King James Bible. Not surprisingly, Norman Mailer has firm views on the matter. “Style,” he says, “of course, is what every good young author looks to acquire. In lovemaking, its equivalent is
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the wrong thing…? He gave out a wail….”), Salman Rushdie, Paul Theroux, Tom Wolfe, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Norman Mailer, Doris Lessing, J. G. Ballard, Iain Banks, David Mitchell, Ben Okri, and Ali Smith (her protagonist, amid orgasm, “We were a bird that could sing
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. With my stuff it is largely a matter of adding color and seeing that I don’t let anything through that’s at all flat.” Norman Mailer was so delighted by one small edit he made that he recorded it in The Spooky Art as an example of good revision. The book
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book I have been doing”: Quoted by Elif Batuman, “Get a Real Degree,” London Review of Books, September 23, 2010. “First person is always more”: Norman Mailer, “First Person Versus Third Person,” The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 32–37. “The change to first person”: For
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sacrifice: For these insights see estowell.edublogs.org/files/2011/09/The-Principles-of-Uncertainty-in-Crime-and-Punishment-1dwwd6z.doc. Francine Prose, who with Norman Mailer: Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer, p. 92. It is also likely that Raskolnikov: See Joseph Frank, “The Making of Crime and Punishment,” in Robert
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: See Melvyn Bragg, The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible, 1611–2011 (London: Hodder, 2011), p. 125. “Style,” he says: Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art. “I’m often drawn by tone”: John Lahr, “By the Book,” The New York Times Book Review, September 21, 2014, p. 8
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”: See P. G. Wodehouse, A Life in Letters, ed. Sophie Ratcliffe (New York: Norton, 2013), letter to William Townend. “ ‘They make Sugar sound so good’ ”: Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art, p. 41. “tore the manuscript to pieces”: See Herbert Leibowitz, “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works
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York: Talk Miramax Books, 2001), copyright © 2001 by Martin Amis; excerpt from The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer (New York: Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2003), copyright © 2003 by Norman Mailer; excerpt from “Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40” interview by Herbert Gold, originally published in
The Future Won't Be Long
by Jarett Kobek · 15 Aug 2017 · 510pp · 138,000 words
AUGUST 1994: Reunion AUGUST 1994: Reunion, Part Two NEW YEAR’S EVE 1994: Baby and Adeline Watch Television APRIL 1995: Baby and Adeline Go to Norman Mailer’s House APRIL 1995: Trouble in Club Land MAY 1995: Adeline Has Lunch with Thomas Cromwell, Touches the Berlin Wall (Again) JUNE 1995: Dinner at
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, oh the people, oh New York, oh your glorious people. Your Puerto Ricans, your Hebrews, your Muslims, your Chinese, your Eurotrash, that fat little fuck Norman Mailer, your uptown rich socialites, your downtown scum, your Black Americans, your Koreans, your Haitians, your Jamaicans, your Italians, your kitchen Irish, Julian Schnabel, your Far
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the concept. When we attended the launch of Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time, I had my first encounter with that fat little fuck Norman Mailer. The old fruitcake stood at the bar, eyes agog at every broad in the joint, drooling in his senescent lust. Every inch the pompous ass
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on her bare shoulder. I let out an audible gasp and stomped over. —Come on, I said, taking Regina by the arm. —Listen, sweetheart, said Norman Mailer, you aren’t the person who’ll decide whether or not she’s leaving. —I hold a great deal of respect for your work, Mr
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, what the hell are you talking about? —I’m talking about beating this old man like a dusty broom, I said. I yanked her away. Norman Mailer never said a word. I suspect that the scene existed beyond his critical capacity. A faggoty farm boy fussing over Nuyorican tail. The triumph of
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multiculturalism. Word traveled around the party that I was the guy who threatened to kill Norman Mailer. High school is inescapable. No matter how many miles from home. This gossip attracted a contingent of younger people. Some pretended to have read Trapped
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the veneer of respectability it casts over its practitioners, an undue conference of reputation and status. Consider the personal history of that fat little fuck Norman Mailer, who inaugurated the 1960s by stabbing his wife and ended the decade by running for mayor of New York. —Oh, fine, fuck it, I said
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we’d started. I spent my spare time wondering how I might fix Baby with a nice boy. APRIL 1995 Baby and Adeline Go to Norman Mailer’s House During one of my more addlepated phases, I sallied forth under the delusion that perhaps one could make friends with those undergoing the
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not sure we’re welcome. Technically, we aren’t invited.” “Whose abode is this?” I asked. “It’s the home of that fat little fuck, Norman Mailer,” said Baby. We swept into an apartment painted a color best described as Alcatraz Green. Amongst the bric-a-brac of a multidecade literary career
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, the tapestries can be three dimensional. They shimmer and move.” Well, well, thinks I, here is a grown man talking to a youngish woman in Norman Mailer’s living room, and his chosen topics of discussion are unicorns and medieval tapestries. Well, well, says I, here’s a man to whom, perhaps
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somewhere around here.” Then, horror of horrors, he suggests that I follow him as we go and look for his lady. We climbed all over Norman Mailer’s apartment. Up ladders, down ladders, into cabins, out of cabins. In the galley, out of the galley. On the balcony, on the roof. At
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a nondescript building, please remember that New York remains New York. Every soul makes the devil’s bargain in the matter of living quarters. Even Norman Mailer. In the elevator, riding towards the sky, questions danced through my head, tormenting me like visions of sugarplum fairies. Adeline, why are you dining at
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wanted a launch party, to which I replied that I’d do it only if they could guarantee the attendance of that fat little fuck Norman Mailer. I had visions of a banquet table and passing around a loving cup and singing about accepting the great toad into our fold. Inquiries were
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read them with the devotion of a monk at vespers. The most significant was by Michiko Kakutani, the great enemy of that fat little fuck Norman Mailer. By Parker’s unhappy tones, I could tell that Kakutani had unsheathed her blades. What the hell, I thought, I’m just a farm boy
Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent
by Robert F. Barsky · 2 Feb 1997
.dll@bookid=9296&filename=page_6.html [4/16/2007 2:28:52 PM] Document Page 7 S. Herman, Jim Kelman, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Paul Mattick, Raymond Williams, and Howard Zinn, to name but a few. While the work of another set of Chomsky contemporariesSam Abramovitch, Norman Epstein (whom
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illegitimate authority" (31 Mar. 1995). One of the activities in which Resist became involved was the March on the Pentagon. The march is described by Norman Mailer in his book The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History. According to Mailer, it all began in September of
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] Mitchell Goodman, Henry Braun, Denise Levertov, Noam Chomsky, William Sloane Coffin, Dwight Macdonald. NOTE: Among the hundreds already committed to this action are Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Ashley Montagu, Arthur Waskow, and professors from most of the major colleges and universities in the East. (qtd. in Mailer 59-60) The resistance-group
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all conspirators" (Radical Priorities 193-94). Chomsky's own involvement with the indictment stemmed from his having signed a statement, along with 560 others (including Norman Mailer), "implicating themselves legally to aid and abet draft resisters" (Radical Priorities 286). The trial of Spock and the others attracted national media attention and, according
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." Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 13 (1970): 183-199. Macdonald, Dwight. Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism. New York: Farrar, 1957. Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History. New York: New American Library, 1968. Matthews, P. H. Grammatical Theory in
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, 98 Lyotard, François, 193, 197 M MacCorquodale, Kenneth, 98 Macdonald, Dwight, 25, 34-36, 65-66, 127-128, 164 Macdonald, Nancy, 34 Madison, James, 209 Mailer, Norman, 127-130, 137 Malcolm X, 132 Manchester Guardian, 136 Mandelbaum, Bernard, 63 Manufacturing Consent [the film], 70 Mao Tsê-Tung, 133 Maoism, 153 file:///D
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The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
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The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune
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World Cities and Nation States
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The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
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Lonely Planet Morocco (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet, Paul Clammer and Paula Hardy · 1 Jul 2014 · 2,020pp · 267,411 words
Lunar Park
by Bret Easton Ellis · 15 Mar 2005 · 422pp · 119,439 words
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
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The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets
by Simon Singh · 29 Oct 2013 · 262pp · 65,959 words
The Kingdom of Speech
by Tom Wolfe · 30 Aug 2016
Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work
by Dr. Paul Babiak and Dr. Robert Hare · 7 May 2007 · 345pp · 100,135 words
The Sociopath Next Door
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Frommer's San Diego 2011
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Moneyball
by Michael Lewis · 1 Jan 2003 · 316pp · 105,384 words
Frommer's Portable San Diego
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Anarchy State and Utopia
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Asymmetry
by Lisa Halliday · 6 Feb 2018 · 287pp · 77,181 words
Against Everything: Essays
by Mark Greif · 5 Sep 2016 · 319pp · 103,707 words
Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa
by Paul Kenyon · 1 Jan 2018 · 513pp · 156,022 words
How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir
by Cat Marnell · 30 Jan 2017 · 416pp · 121,024 words
Having and Being Had
by Eula Biss · 15 Jan 2020 · 199pp · 61,648 words
My Misspent Youth: Essays
by Meghan Daum · 2 Mar 2001 · 131pp · 45,778 words
Guadalcanal Diary
by Richard Tregaskis · 1 Mar 1943 · 264pp · 80,849 words
How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman · 9 May 2018 · 245pp · 72,893 words
Work! Consume! Die!
by Frankie Boyle · 12 Oct 2011
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
by Neal Gabler · 17 Nov 2010 · 622pp · 194,059 words
A Man on the Moon
by Andrew Chaikin · 1 Jan 1994 · 816pp · 242,405 words
The Planets
by Dava Sobel · 1 Jan 2005 · 190pp · 52,570 words
Lint
by Steve Aylett · 2 May 2005
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
by Chris Hedges · 31 Aug 2002 · 218pp · 61,301 words
Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan · 25 Sep 2017 · 801pp · 209,348 words
Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11
by James Donovan · 12 Mar 2019
Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are
by Rebecca Boyle · 16 Jan 2024 · 354pp · 109,574 words