Books by Norman Mailer

A collection of stories, essays, newspaper pieces, notes, and part of a play.

Originally written as a serial for Esquire, AN AMERICAN DREAM tells the story of Rojack, who murders his wife. The crime revitalizes him, heightening his senses and awareness. His encounters with the police, an affair with a nightclub singer, his defeat of her lover, and his dealings with his powerful father-in-law are nearly surrealistic or dreamlike. Mailer's novel draws on philosophy, pop art, romance and satire.

In the Egypt of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties--1290-1100 B.C.--Menenhetet is reincarnated three times, his fate taking him from peasant childhood, to power as the pharaoh's most intimate adviser, to the squalor of grave robbing.

The novelists interpretes and dramatizes the October 1967 anti-war demonstration in Washington and the issues and politics involved.

Mike Lovett, a wounded veteran of World War II, recuperates in a Brooklyn boardinghouse filled with neighbors just as isolated as (and even more bizarre than) himself. The predatory Guinevere and her invisible husband, the secretive ex-Communist McLeod, the effeminate Hollingsworth, the unstable Lannie Madison--all have ended up under the same roof and have worked out some semblance of a common life that keeps none of them very happy. Eventually, each focuses his energy on making an alliance with Mike against the rest of the house.

A year's worth of conversations between a twenty-eight-year-old journalist and his Pulitzer Prize-winning father cover a wide range of topics about which the son has posed questions and challenged his father's answers, in a volume that explores key events from the past sixty years and life in America today. Original.

The story of Adolf Hitler's childhood as seen through the eyes of Dieter, a demon sent to put him on his destructive path, explores the idea that Hitler had no Jewish heritage but was the product of incest.

A mysterious SS man offers an insightful glimpse of the life and career of Adolf Hitler, revealing a unique perspective on his family, his childhood and adolescence, and the evolution of the man who became the personification of evil, in a panoramic novel that explores the essence of the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

In the Southern California resort town of Desert D'Or, a town controlled for profit by the motion-picture industry, sexual incontinence, avarice, and general corruption taint the lives, relationships, and characters of a select group of men and women.

The spirited chronicler of war, politics, sex, and himself trains his sharpered wits and sights on the principles, promoters, and observers of the 1974 Ali-Foreman championship fight in Kinshasa, Zaire.

The spirited chronicler of war, politics, sex, and modern life trains his wits and sights on the principles, promoters, and observers of the 1974 Ali-Forman championship boxing match held in Kinshasa, Zaire.

Only a novelist as daring as Mailer would attempt to retell the story of Jesus in Jesus's own words. . . . Its penetration into Jesus's human heart rivals Dostoyevsky for depth and insight. Its re-creation of the world through which Jesus walked is as real as blood. Ultimately, Mailer convinces, more than any writer before him, that for Jesus the man it could have been just like this; and that is, in itself, some sort of literary miracle".--"Publishers Weekly" (starred review).

The American soul in its many shapes and guises has always been Norman Mailer's primary literary interest. Now, here in the full maturity of his powers, he confronts that subject face to face. Harlot's Ghost is Mailer's masterpiece, his crowning achievement, his long-awaited great American novel. It is a vast novel of the CIA, and a deep look into the depths of the American soul from which the CIA--its people and its works--emerged.

After an encounter with a woman who reminds him of the wife who deserted him, Timothy Madden awakens with fragmented memories and an agonizing suspicion that he committed murder.

On the hundredth anniversary of the publication of HUCKLEBERRY FINN, Norman Mailer writes an appreciation of Twain's novel.

Part biography, part pictorial retrospective, this informative volume captures all of the magic, all of the subtleties of the screen legend's beauty, vulnerability, and love affair with the camera.

Master Spy is Lawrence Schiller's shocking story of FBI Special Agent Robert P. Hanssen, the man who singlehandedly created the greatest breach of security in the history of our country.

In Master Spy, Schiller re-creates a gripping portrait of Hanssen, who for twenty-two years was a loving husband, a devoted father of six, a deeply devout Catholic and member of Opus Dei, a passionate anticommunist, a dedicated FBI agent, and a traitor the likes of which the United States has never seen before.

An American novelist records his reaction to the delegates, the issues, and the events of the 1968 conventions.

Norman Mailer writes about the 1968 conventions--when the Republicans nominated Richard Nixon in Miami, and the Democrats Herbert Humphrey in Chicago. The Democratic convention turned into a riot, police against protestors, and Mailer is particularly eloquent on the subject of the role of Mayor Dailey in those tumultuous events.

An unexpected collection from Norman Mailer—a book of his selected poems and more than one hundred of his drawings, most of them never before published. Modest Gifts is full of what the author calls “casual pleasures”—witty, naughty, and surprisingly tender verse and art. Lust, seduction, betrayal, jealousy, and even the banality of cocktail party chatter are depicted with humor, affection, and, above all, honesty. Here is an aspect of Norman Mailer unknown to many: lighthearted, prankish, whimsical, and often gentle, playfully sketching the intimate urban world that surrounds us. Modest, funny, and true, each poem and drawing shows a new side of one of the greatest writers of our time.

Written in gritty, journalistic detail, The Naked and the Dead follows a platoon of Marines who are stationed on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948 with the wisdom of a man twice Mailer's age and the raw courage of the young man he was, The Naked and the Dead is representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially for the occasion by Norman Mailer.

A series of dialogues between the authors presents an intimate new view of the world that suggests that it is created by an artistic God who often succeeds but can fail in the face of determined opposition, and that humans have been given the freedom and responsibility to choose their own paths. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

A startling portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald by the world-renowned author of The Executioner's Song. Mailer reconstructs the life of this curiously adventurous if doom-laden young man, giving a full account of the Minsk years, that hitherto uncharted period of Oswald's life.

Essays and sketches on a variety of topics.

One of America's greatest living authors probes the soul and explosive early years of the passionate, driven Pablo Picasso, whose genius was celebrated as rogue, insatiable lover, and conquistador ready for new battles. of color photos.

Mr. Mailer takes to task members of the female sex who have recently attacked male chauvinism at its most vicious level.

In The Spooky Art, Norman Mailer discusses with signature candor the rewards and trials of the writing life, and recommends the tools to navigate it. Addressing the reader in a conversational tone, he draws on the best of more than fifty years of his own criticism, advice, and detailed observations about the writer’s craft.

A prominent college professor enters a world of terror after murdering his wife.

“Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad.”—from Why Are We at War?

Why Are We at War? is an explosive argument about George W. Bush and his quest for empire. Norman Mailer, one of the greatest authors of our time, lays bare the White House’s position on why war in Iraq is necessary and justified. By scrutinizing the administration’s words and actions leading up to the current crisis, Mailer carefully builds his case that Bush is pursuing war not in the name of security or anti-terrorism or human rights but in an undeclared yet fully realized ambition of global empire.

Mailer unleashes his trademark moral rigor on an administration he believes is recklessly endangering our very notion of freedom and democracy. For more than fifty years, in classic works of both fiction and nonfiction, Mailer has persistently exposed the folly of the powerful and the mighty. Beginning with his debut masterpiece, The Naked and the Dead, Mailer has repeatedly told the truth about war and why men fight. Why Are We at War? returns Mailer to the subject he knows better than any other writer in America today: the gravity of the battlefield and the grand hubris of the politicians who send soldiers there to die.

D. J. Jethroe, son of a cigarette-filter manufacturer, and his friend Tex Hyde go on a hunting trip to Alaska with D. J.'s father Rusty. The bears they hunt are unusually crazed. Mailer uses the bear hunt as a lens through which to view human nature, an allegory to explore the United States's involvement in Vietnam.