Books with author Norman Mailer

1968. The Vietnam War was raging. President Lyndon Johnson, facing a challenge in his own Democratic Party from the maverick antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy, announced that he would not seek a second term. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and riots broke out in inner cities throughout America. Bobby Kennedy was killed after winning the California primary in June. In August, Republicans met in Miami, picking the little-loved Richard Nixon as their candidate, while in September, Democrats in Chicago backed the ineffectual vice president, Hubert Humphrey. TVs across the country showed antiwar protesters filling the streets of Chicago and the police running amok, beating and arresting demonstrators and delegates alike. In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer, America’s most protean and provocative writer, brings a novelist’s eye to bear on the events of 1968, a decisive year in modern American politics, from which today’s bitterly divided country arose.

In 1975, at the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in Kinshasa, Zaire, Muhammad Ali met George Foreman in the ring. Foreman's genius employed silence, serenity and cunning. He had never been defeated. His hands were his instrument, and 'he kept them in his pockets the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case'. Together the two men made boxing history in an explosive meeting of two great minds, two iron wills and two monumental egos.

The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer, Hutchinson, 1979, 1st edition (UK).1,056 pages. Dust jacket. Description: Book; Blue cloth with both silver and copper lettering to spine only, publisher's motif embossed on the cover, goldenrod endpapers. Dust jacket; Black wraparound design with white lettering over and under sunset photograph by Roger Ward, author's photo on back cover. Not price clipped. Condition: Book; Near fine. Bright and clean covers and pages with no marks. Rubbing to lower edge of spine, some dust to front and back boards. Autopen-signature on Title page, title page professionally laid in from identical book that had water damaged to boards and other pages. Book is Pulitzer Prize winner. Mailer "longpen" signed books at the 6/16/07 Edinburgh International Book Festival when health prevented him attending in person. It is not known if this is the first and/or only time the author used a autopen. Dust jacket; Near fine. Bright and clean, not price clipped, no marks or tears, very light crease to three of the points, else fine.

No career in modern American letters is at once so brilliant, varied, and controversial as that of Norman Mailer. In a span of more than six decades, Mailer has searched into subjects ranging from World War II to Ancient Egypt, from the march on the Pentagon to Marilyn Monroe, from Henry Miller and Mohammad Ali to Jesus Christ. Now, in The Castle in the Forest, his first major work of fiction in more than a decade, Mailer offers what may be his consummate literary endeavor: He has set out to explore the evil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man who is later revealed to be an exceptional presence, gives us young Adolf from birth, as well as Hitler’s father and mother, his sisters and brothers, and the intimate details of his childhood and adolescence.A tapestry of unforgettable characters, The Castle in the Forest delivers its playful twists and surprises with astonishing insight into the nature of the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all. At its core is a hypothesis that propels this novel and makes it a work of stunning originality. Now, on the eve of his eighty-fourth birthday, Norman Mailer may well be saying more than he ever has before.From the Hardcover edition.