Norman Mailer

Based on Wikipedia: Norman Mailer

The Writer Who Stabbed His Wife and Almost Won

Norman Mailer stabbed his wife at a party in 1960. Nearly killed her. He served three years of probation for assault, and then he kept writing. He kept winning prizes. He kept getting married—six times in total, fathering nine children along the way. He ran for mayor of New York City. He made avant-garde films where he bit Rip Torn's ear during an unscripted fight scene. He wrote what many consider the greatest American war novel of the twentieth century.

This is not a story about redemption. It's a story about a particular kind of American genius—brilliant, brutal, and utterly incapable of getting out of his own way.

The Making of a Literary Brawler

Born Nachem Malech Mailer in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1923, he came into the world as the son of a South African-born accountant and a mother who ran a housekeeping agency. The family was Jewish, and they raised him in Brooklyn—first in Flatbush, then in Crown Heights. By sixteen, he was at Harvard.

Think about that for a moment. Sixteen years old, studying engineering at one of the most prestigious universities in America, but sneaking off to take writing courses on the side. At eighteen, he won a college fiction contest. The story was called "The Greatest Thing in the World." He was just getting started.

When World War Two came calling, Mailer tried to dodge it. He argued that he was writing an "important literary work" about the war and therefore deserved a deferment. The Army was unimpressed. They drafted him anyway, trained him at Fort Bragg, and shipped him off to the Philippines.

What happened next would change American literature.

Letters from the War

In the Philippines, Mailer started as a typist at regimental headquarters. Then he became a wire lineman—the soldier who strings communication cables between units. Finally, he volunteered for a reconnaissance platoon, the soldiers who slip behind enemy lines to gather intelligence. He completed more than two dozen patrols in contested territory. He was in firefights. He saw combat up close.

Throughout it all, he wrote letters to his wife Bea. Almost daily. Roughly four hundred letters in total, each one a small piece of what he was seeing, feeling, processing. When he looked back on it later, Mailer called the Army "the worst experience of my life, and also the most important."

Those letters became the foundation of The Naked and the Dead.

Instant Fame at Twenty-Five

Published in 1948, The Naked and the Dead hit American culture like a bomb. It sat on the New York Times bestseller list for sixty-two weeks—still the only one of Mailer's novels to reach the number one position. It sold more than a million copies in its first year. Three million by 1981. It has never gone out of print.

The Modern Library included it in their list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. Critics hailed it as one of the finest depictions of Americans in combat during World War Two. Norman Mailer was twenty-five years old, and he was famous.

This kind of early success can destroy a writer. The pressure to repeat it, the impossibility of topping yourself, the knowledge that everything you do from now on will be measured against that first explosive achievement. Many writers crumble under it. Mailer did something different.

He got weirder.

The Experimental Years

His second novel, Barbary Shore, came out in 1951. Critics hated it. It was a surreal parable about leftist politics set in a Brooklyn rooming house—nothing like the muscular war narrative that had made his name. His third novel, The Deer Park, drew on his time as a Hollywood screenwriter and was rejected by seven publishers for being too sexual before finally finding a home. It wasn't a critical success either, though it sold reasonably well.

Mailer seemed determined to confound expectations. His fourth novel, An American Dream, he wrote as a serial for Esquire magazine, publishing each chapter just two months after writing it. Live-wire writing, no safety net. His fifth, Why Are We in Vietnam?, was so experimental in its prose that critics compared it to James Joyce. Joyce Carol Oates called it "an outrageous little masterpiece."

But here's the thing about Mailer: he wasn't content to just write novels. He wanted to change the very nature of what writing could be.

Inventing New Journalism

In 1955, Mailer co-founded The Village Voice, a weekly newspaper covering arts and politics in New York's Greenwich Village neighborhood. He was initially a silent investor, but eventually couldn't resist writing a column called "Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers." The title alone tells you something about his sensibility.

More importantly, those seventeen columns helped him develop what he called "American existentialism"—a philosophy of hip, of resistance to conformity. His 1957 essay "The White Negro" became one of the most anthologized and controversial pieces of postwar American writing, sketching out the figure of the hipster as someone standing against the deadening forces of conventional society.

Then came 1960, and "Superman Comes to the Supermarket."

This was Mailer's account of John F. Kennedy's emergence at the Democratic Party convention, written for Esquire magazine. The piece helped launch what we now call New Journalism—a style that brings the techniques of literary fiction to factual reporting. Scene-setting, character development, subjective perspective, dramatic structure. Journalism that reads like a novel.

Mailer was furious when Esquire's editors changed his title to "Superman Comes to the Supermart." He refused to write for them for years afterward. The magazine eventually apologized.

The March on the Pentagon

October 1967. Tens of thousands of protesters marched on the Pentagon to oppose the Vietnam War. Norman Mailer was among them, though he had no intention of writing about it.

His friend Willie Morris, editor of Harper's magazine, convinced him to produce a long essay about the experience. What emerged, in a concentrated two-month burst of writing, was a ninety-thousand-word piece—the longest nonfiction work ever published by an American magazine at that time.

Mailer did something unexpected with it. He wrote about himself in the third person, referring to "Mailer" as if he were a character in someone else's story. This technique, called illeism, gave him an ironic distance from his own ego while also indulging it shamelessly. He'd gotten the idea from reading The Education of Henry Adams as a Harvard freshman.

The piece became the book The Armies of the Night in 1968. It won both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the National Book Award. Critics who had dismissed him as a has-been or a blowhard were forced to reconsider. As one commentator put it, "Mailer disarmed the literary world."

Creative Nonfiction as an Art Form

The term "New Journalism" gets thrown around a lot, but it's worth understanding what it actually means. Traditional journalism strives for objectivity—the reporter as invisible observer, presenting facts without interpretation. New Journalism said: that's a lie. Every piece of writing has a perspective. Why not acknowledge it? Why not bring all the tools of the novelist to bear on real events?

Mailer became one of the form's great practitioners, alongside Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe. His major works in this mode included Miami and the Siege of Chicago, about the chaotic 1968 political conventions; Of a Fire on the Moon, a sprawling meditation on the Apollo 11 mission; The Prisoner of Sex, his combative response to feminist critiques of his work; and The Fight, his account of Muhammad Ali's legendary victory over George Foreman in Zaire.

All of these books were finalists for the National Book Award. All of them used Mailer's signature third-person self-reference. All of them blurred the line between journalism and literature.

The Gilmore Case

In 1977, Gary Gilmore became the first person executed in the United States after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty. He had killed two men in Utah during robberies and, controversially, demanded that his sentence be carried out rather than fighting it through appeals.

Mailer spent years researching and writing about Gilmore's life and death. The result was The Executioner's Song, published in 1979. He called it a "real-life novel"—a term that captures its hybrid nature, neither pure journalism nor pure fiction.

Joan Didion, reviewing it for the front page of the New York Times Book Review, called it "an absolutely astonishing book." It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction—Mailer's second Pulitzer, this time in a completely different category from his first.

The Long Projects

Mailer spent more time on Ancient Evenings than on any other book, working on it intermittently from 1972 to 1983. It was a novel set in Egypt during the Twentieth Dynasty, around 1100 BCE—about as far from contemporary America as a writer could get. Reviews were generally negative, though Harold Bloom acknowledged its ambition even while criticizing its execution.

His longest novel, Harlot's Ghost, ran to 1,310 pages and explored the hidden world of the CIA from World War Two through 1965. He did enormous research for it, and the book remains on CIA reading lists to this day. It ends with the words "To be continued"—Mailer planned a sequel called Harlot's Grave, but he never wrote it.

His final novel, The Castle in the Forest, focused on Hitler's childhood. Published in January 2007, it reached number five on the bestseller list and received some of his best reviews in decades. It also won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award from Literary Review magazine. Mailer was eighty-four years old. He died several months later.

The Films Nobody Asked For

Novels weren't enough for Mailer. In the late 1960s, he directed three improvisational avant-garde films: Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and Maidstone.

The making of Maidstone became more famous than the film itself. During shooting, actor Rip Torn attacked Mailer with a hammer in what was supposedly an improvised scene. Mailer suffered a head injury. In the ensuing struggle, Mailer bit Torn's ear, which later became infected. The Criterion Collection released these films in a box set in 2012, treating them as legitimate works of experimental cinema.

In 1987, Mailer adapted and directed a film version of his novel Tough Guys Don't Dance, starring Ryan O'Neal. It has since become a minor camp classic—which is a polite way of saying it's so strange that people watch it ironically.

He also acted occasionally. He played architect Stanford White in the 1981 film Ragtime. He played Harry Houdini in Matthew Barney's avant-garde Cremaster 2. He collaborated with Sergio Leone on early drafts of Once Upon a Time in America, though Leone brought in other writers before the final version.

The Assault

We need to talk about November 1960.

At a party in their Manhattan apartment, Norman Mailer stabbed his wife Adele Morales with a penknife. The wound was serious—she nearly died. Mailer was convicted of assault and served three years of probation.

This was not a secret. It was not buried. Mailer went on to have a highly visible public career for another forty-seven years. He won two Pulitzer Prizes after stabbing his wife. He ran for mayor of New York in 1969, finishing fourth in the Democratic primary. He remained a fixture of American intellectual life, appearing constantly in the press, giving lectures, writing controversial essays.

The literary world's willingness to overlook this says something uncomfortable about how we treat genius. Or how we used to. Whether that calculation would work out the same way today is an open question.

The Village Voice and American Existentialism

When Mailer co-founded The Village Voice in 1955, alternative weeklies barely existed as a category. The Voice would go on to become enormously influential in American culture, covering politics, arts, and counterculture from its base in Greenwich Village.

Mailer's early columns for the paper helped him develop his philosophical framework. He was interested in what he called "hip"—a stance of resistance to the conformity he saw strangling postwar American life. The corporate job, the suburban house, the gray flannel suit, the stifled emotions. Against this, he posed the figure of the hipster: someone who lived in the present, embraced risk, rejected respectability.

"The White Negro" laid out this vision in terms that were sometimes offensive, often provocative, and undeniably influential. The essay argued that white Americans could learn something from Black culture about living authentically in a hostile society. It was praised and attacked in roughly equal measure, which was exactly how Mailer liked it.

Six Wives, Nine Children

Mailer's personal life was chaotic in ways that mirrored his public persona. He married six times:

• Beatrice Silverman (married 1944)—the wife who received his wartime letters
• Adele Morales (married 1954)—the wife he stabbed
• Lady Jeanne Campbell (married 1962)
• Beverly Bentley (married 1963)
• Carol Stevens (married 1980)
• Norris Church (married 1980)

He fathered nine children across these marriages. The pattern suggests someone incapable of stability but unwilling to give up on the institution of marriage itself. He kept trying. He kept failing. He kept starting over.

The Connection to Hemingway

There's a reason Mailer comes up in discussions of Ernest Hemingway. Both men cultivated public personas built around a certain idea of masculinity—physical, combative, hard-drinking. Both were war veterans who drew on that experience in their fiction. Both won major prizes. Both had complicated relationships with women and with their own reputations.

But where Hemingway developed a lean, stripped-down prose style, Mailer went the opposite direction. His sentences could sprawl. His books could run to over a thousand pages. He was maximalist where Hemingway was minimalist.

And Mailer lived long enough to become something Hemingway never did: a survivor of his own legend. Hemingway died by suicide at sixty-one. Mailer lived to eighty-four, long enough to see his reputation rise and fall and rise again, long enough to keep producing work that surprised people, long enough to become an institution.

The Legacy

Norman Mailer had eleven bestsellers across seven decades. He won two Pulitzer Prizes in different categories. He helped invent a new form of journalism. He wrote what many consider the definitive American novel of World War Two. He also stabbed his wife, made unwatchable films, and spent much of his career being loudly wrong about things.

He was not a good person by most reasonable definitions. He was an important writer by almost any definition. American culture has never quite figured out what to do with people who are both of these things at once.

When he died in November 2007, he left behind a body of work that remains impossible to ignore—sprawling, uneven, brilliant in places, embarrassing in others, always unmistakably his own. The worst experience of his life, the Army, gave him his greatest novel. The worst thing he ever did, the stabbing, somehow didn't end his career. He kept writing. He kept fighting. He kept being Norman Mailer until the very end.