John cassavetes norman mailer biography

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

And yet, as his own official biographer J. Michael Lennon asserts to me, “Mailer became a major biographer in the last half of his career.”

Thirty years ago, two intriguing books by Mailer appeared just a few months apart: Oswald’s Tale: An American Mysteryand Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man. 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 Marilyn, Mailer wrote several other books that leaned heavily into biography, among t How Norman Mailer changed the face of biography CUDOZ