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Politics, war, sex, boxing, and the art of writing: an era's most controversial writer at his slashing and provocative bestThe electric and fearless essays of Norman Mailer were essential to the intellectual climate of 1960s America. Here, gathered into one volume for the first time by acclaimed Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon, are all the essential essays from the classic collections The Presidential Papers (1963) , Cannibals and Christians (1966) , and Existential Errands (1972) , each a fascinating window on one of the most extraordinary and tumultuous decades in the nation's history. A self-appointed exorcist of the culture's demons and an unrestrained mythologizer of his own identity, Mailer contemplated and often skewered icons of politics and literature, charted psychosexual undercurrents and covert power plays, and gloried in the exercise of a pugnacious prose style that was all his own.
About the Author
Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 - November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor and political activist. His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948. His best-known work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, which was published in 1979, and for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, his book Armies of the Night was awarded the National Book Award.Along with Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which uses the style and devices of literary fiction in fact-based journalism.Mailer was also known for his essays, the most renowned of which was "The White Negro." He was a cultural commentator and critic, expressing his views through his novels, journalism, essays and frequent media appearances.In 1955, Mailer and four others founded The Village Voice, an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village. Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Carl Van Vechten [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
