Norman mailer prize for distinguished biography examples

Many labels leap to mind in association with the prolific and controversial Norman Mailer, who died in 2007, but “biographer” is not typically one of them.

It is also significant that the Kennedy-admiring author locates a point of empathy with Oswald as the unseen needing to be seen — a man seemingly fated for historical insignificance violently wresting the wheel away from fate.

Oswald’s Tale received some of Mailer’s strongest reviews since The Executioner’s Song, though its lukewarm sales must have disappointed.

It is possible that the novelist, if his or her talent is deep, may even unravel enigmas that major disciplines are not ready to approach. You must wonder which of your friends would be capable of doing this to you. In these years, I’m feeling the woeful emotions of an old carriage maker as he watches the disappearance of his trade before the onrush of the automobile.

Who knows if she was really like this? Well, loud and justifiable praises of his prowess as a writer, however, competes with some rather violent objections to some of his views. As a matter of fact, I remember telling him that I understood him more now. He was not considered a serious practitioner of the genre in the same sense as Edmund Morris, Ron Chernow or his friend Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Norman Mailer is nothing if not a worthy adversary. I haven’t heard many women talk about Marilyn… When I was reading it, I thought, these are Norman’s fantasies about Marilyn. If, as he has said, “Writers are the marrow of the nation, its nutrient,” then as a nation, as readers, we are healthier, stronger, smarter, more resistant, perhaps even more honest because of him.

The purpose of a great novel is not, however, to cater to one’s passing needs but to enter one’s life, even alter it. Perhaps too, as Lennon speculates, readers recoiled at Mailer’s “Tolstoyan compassion” toward the purported assassin. I think you would agree that for a writer this prolific, this able with language, he should have the last word.

At any rate, I thank Toni Morrison for her prodigious generosity. The good serious novel, and most certainly, the rare great novel, is now inimical to the needs of this marketplace. Like the country, the man, the writer, is fascinated by the romance of violence. Nonetheless, the best do look to honor the profound demands of their profession by offering insights with which goodreaders can enrich themselves on the meaning of their lives.

To the best of my knowledge, at least, she has not. “Oswald’s Tale… is another of Mailer’s books for readers a century hence,” Lennon writes in A Double Life, “readers removed from the pain of one of the greatest tragedies of twentieth-century American life.” Still, Mailer’s deeply felt consideration of Oswald’s psyche is of value to the literary-minded student of American history.

But unlike with Marilyn and the later Picasso book, the speculation is grounded in extensive on-the-ground research conducted by Mailer and his research collaborator Lawrence Schiller in Russia, along with a careful parsing of the Warren Report and the other established American sources.

The book ranges across the entirety of Oswald’s life.

Both were eclipsed at the time by competing treatments of their subjects, but Mailer’s volumes are the highpoint of his idiosyncratic contribution to biography and are well worth a reappraisal.

In addition to his three official entries in the field, including his 1973 Marilyn, Mailer wrote several other books that leaned heavily into biography, among them The Fight, The Executioner’s Songand the biographical novels The Gospel According to the Sonand The Castle in the Forest, along with scores of magazine profiles stretching at least as far back as the John F.

Kennedy-themed “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” from 1960. “I loved it,” she says:

I thought it was a great biography because it touched on the human quality of Picasso.