NOVEMBER 2007

Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, but he was raised in Brooklyn, New York. Every summer the family went back to Long Branch, where Mailer's grandparents had a small summer hotel.

Mailer's first literary effort was a 250-page story, which he wrote at the age of nine in notebooks, called 'Invasion From Mars'. However, it was not until at Harvard, when he wanted to become a writer. In 1939 he graduated from Boys High School and then studied at Harvard University, Cambridge (1939-43), receiving S.B. in aeronautical engineering. In 1941 Mailer won Story magazine's college contest with a story entitled 'The Greatest Thing in the World'.

During World War II Mailer was a sergeant in the United States Army. He wanted to go to Europe and be in the first wave of invasion troops, and was disappointed when he was sent to the South Pacific. He served in Leyte, Luzon, and Japan, as a cool and detached observer of what happened on the war scene. Most of the time in the Philippines Mailer felt tired. He saw a little bit action but not as much as it was in THE NAKED AND THE DEAD (1948).

In his letters to his first wife he described patrols he was on during the war - Mailer did not want to carry notes with him. In 1946 he was discharged, and the next year he enrolled at the Sorbonne. The Naked and Dead was born in fifteen months. It was published when Mailer was just 25, and made him world famous. "Its success rips away my former identity," Mailer has said.

The Naked and The Dead drew upon the author's combat experiences in the Philippines. It is not so funny as Heller's Catch-22 or Jaroslav Hašek's Good Soldier Schweik, but more realistic than Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front, and not so sentimental as Hemingway's Farewell to Arms. The story depicts a group of American soldiers, who are stationed on the Japanese-held island in the Pacific. Flashbacks that illuminate their past mix with feverish combat scenes. When the book appeared in 1949, it was on the other hand hailed as one of the finest American novels of WW II, and criticized as obscene, plainly motivated by personal disgust with army life. In England, several publishers rejected the book because of the obscenity of its language. - "It is virtually a Kinsey Report on the sexual behavior of the GI. Its style is an almost pure Army billingsgate that will offend many readers, although in no sense is it exaggerated: Mr. Mailer's soldiers are real persons, speaking the vernacular of human bitterness and agony. It gives off a skyglow that is quite faithful to the spectrum of battle, and exposes the blood, if not always the guts, of war." (David Dempsey in The New York Times, May 9, 1948)

After a long, chaotic period, Mailer realized that he can write well about people, who are like himself - people without roots, such as Henry Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, and Picasso. In the 1960s Mailer was listed among the New Journalists, who applied the techniques of novel writing to depict real events and people. He co-founded and named the Village Voice, one of the earliest underground American newspapers. He was a columnist ("Big Bite") at Esquire (1962-63) and Commentary (1962-63), a member of the executive board (1968-73), and the president (1984-86) of PEN American Center. In 1969 he was an independent candidate for mayor of New York City.

THE PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS (1963) established Mailer as one of the most vigorous essayists in America. He wanted to advise President Kennedy, but he did not like Lyndon Johnson's face. "Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the Gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision." (from The Presidential Papers, 1963) He used in THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT (1968) the techniques of fiction, and studied his own reactions as a barometer of the events themselves. The work won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. In the same vein he wrote MIAMI AND THE SIEGE OF CHICAGO (1968) and OF A FIRE ON THE MOON (1970). In CANNIBALS AND CHRISTIANS (1966) Mailer accused American writers of not being able to produce works that would "clarify a nation's vision of itself" - "After his heroic failure, American literature was isolated-it was necessary to give courses in American literature to Americans."

Mailer has written on the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions since 1960. He has placed himself at the center of American political and cultural life and reported his observations on the civil rights movement, political assassinations and other upheavals. Mailer has published essays in popular and men's magazines, such as Esquire and Playboy, as well as in more intellectual journals like Dissent, Commentary, and the New York Review of Books. "It is not routine to bring off a long novel when your ambition is more than major, when you will settle for nothing less than an attempt to write a great novel, and when you are into your sixties and not all that well." (Norman Mailer in The New York Review of Books, December 17, 1998)

HARLOT'S GHOST (1992) was a 1300 pages long chronicle of the CIA - the author himself considered it one of his best books. While gathering material for it, Mailer also found not previously known Russian documents for OSWALD'S TALE (1995), his exhaustive biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON (1997) was a relatively mild retelling of the Jesus story compared to Nikos Kazantzákis novel The Last Temptations of Christ (1955) or Jose Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991). The book continued his series of portraits of well- known figures, from Monroe and Gary Gilmore to Oswald and Pablo Picasso. THE TIME OF OUR TIME (1998) was an anthology of Norman Mailer's fiction and non-fiction writings. "Yet what this volume makes clear, if it were not already quite apparent, is that Mr. Mailer's strength lies in non-fiction, not in fiction." (Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, May 8, 1998) Mailer celebrated his 80th birthday in New York and published THE SPOOKY ART (2003), a collection of writings about writing. Mailer was awarded in 2005 the National Book Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In a way, THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST (2007), about the young Adolf Hitler, formed a complementary pair to the The Gospel According to the Son. The story is narrated by a devil.