This book of essays by Norman Mailer’s biographer, Dr. J. Michael Lennon, collect personal and literary reminiscences, insights, and investigations from the last half century. Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon’s remembrances track the influence not only of his literary
pater familias
, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and De Lillo and, not least, Mailer himself.
Spis treści
Contents Acknowledgments and Appreciations 13 Prologue: In the “I” of the Storm 19 The Dark Closet: A Fall River Memoir 28 Aunt Nellie and the Bigberry Stadium Incident 39 Altar Boy 46 The Archivist’s Apprentice 51 Meeting Mailer 71 Tom Wolfe, Upstart, R.I.P. 79 Mailer’s Library 82 Feathered with Forbearance: Shirley Hazzard on Graham Greene 92 Bishop, Pound, and Prospero in Buzzards Bay 97 The Touchdown Twins: James Jones and Norman Mailer 116 With the Goddess of the Night: John Bowers’s Memoir 126 Lowney Handy and Her Improbable Writers Colony 130 To Fame from Obscurity: The Letters of James Jones 135 James Jones’s World War II Trilogy 141 Gore Vidal, American Iconoclast 148 Gore and Norman in Provincetown 156 Triumph at the Biltmore: John F. Kennedy’s Nomination 160 A Meeting of Giants: Ali and Foreman 167 Craftsman of Violence: Muhammad Ali 174 She Is Her Own Most Memorable Character: Joan Didion 179 Motion Slowed into Choreography: Didion Drives South 183 Crafted Confession: Re-reading Mary Mc Carthy’s Memories of a Catholic Childhood 188 James Baldwin: Preacher vs. Writer 196 Drenched in Dread: Don De Lillo’s Moribundi 203 Dread Persists: De Lillo’s Digital Disaster 210 A Mistake 10, 000 Miles Long: Robert Stone 214 A Magnificent Keening: Philip Brady 221 Murder, Sex, and the Writing Life: An Interview with Mailer’s Biographer by Ronald K. Fried 227 Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian? 237 Mailer’s Last Days 254 Fathers and Sons 288
O autorze
J. Michael Lennon, Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University, and Chair of the Editorial Board of the Mailer Review, is the author or editor of several books about Norman Mailer, including
Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013),
Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (2014); and
On God: An Uncommon Conversation (2007, co-authored with Mailer). He teaches in the Maslow Family Graduate Creative Writing Program at Wilkes University, which he co-founded in 2005. His work has appeared in Paris Review, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, New York, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Times Literary Supplement, Provincetown Arts, Hippocampus, and the Mailer Review.
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