Norman Mailer Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Naked and the Dead (1948)
  2. Barbary Shore (1952)
  3. The Deer Park (1955)
  4. The Presidential Papers (1963)
  5. Cannibals and Christians (1966)
  6. An American Dream (1966)
  7. Bull Fight: A Photographic Narrative (1967)
  8. Why Are We in Vietnam? (1968)
  9. Maidstone (1971)
  10. St. George and the Godfather (1972)
  11. Watching My Name Go By (1974)
  12. Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots (1980)
  13. After the White Negro (1982)
  14. Ancient Evenings (1983)
  15. Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984)
  16. Harlot’s Ghost (1991)
  17. The Gospel According to the Son (1997)
  18. The Castle in the Forest (2007)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Advertiseme*nts for Myself (1959)
  2. Deaths for the Ladies (1962)
  3. Existential Errands (1973)
  4. The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (1980)
  5. Pieces (1982)
  6. Essential Mailer (1982)
  7. Pontifications (1982)
  8. Pieces and Pontifications (1983)
  9. The Time Of Our Time (1998)
  10. Modest Gifts (2003)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. The White Negro (1959)
  2. Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)
  3. Why Are We at War? (1968)
  4. The Armies of the Night (1968)
  5. A Fire on the Moon (1970)
  6. Prisoner of Sex (1971)
  7. Marilyn (1973)
  8. The Faith of Graffiti (1974)
  9. The Fight (1975)
  10. Genius & Lust (1976)
  11. Some Honorable Men: Political Conventions, 1960-1972 (1976)
  12. A Transit To Narcissus: A Facsimile of the Original Typescript (1978)
  13. The Executioner’s Song (1979)
  14. Of Women and Their Elegance (1980)
  15. Huckleberry Finn: Alive at 100 (1985)
  16. Language of Men (1989)
  17. How the Wimp Won the War (1992)
  18. Oswald’s Tale (1995)
  19. Portrait of Picasso As a Young Man (1995)
  20. Muhammad Ali: Ringside (With: Joyce Carol Oates) (1999)
  21. Into the Mirror: The Life of Robert P. Hanssen (2002)
  22. The Spooky Art (2003)
  23. The Big Empty (2006)
  24. On God: An Uncommon Conversation (2007)
  25. Mind of an Outlaw (2013)
  26. Vidal vs. Mailer (With: Gore Vidal) (2013)
  27. Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (2014)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Norman Mailer Books Overview

The Naked and the Dead

Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since enjoyed a long and well deserved tenure in the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially for the occasion by Norman Mailer. Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story 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.

Barbary Shore

Mike Lovett rents a room in a Brooklyn boarding house with the intention of writing a novel. Wounded during World War II, Lovett is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. But Lovett’s housemates have secrets of their own. As these mysterious figures vie for Lovett’s allegiance, Barbary Shore plays havoc with our certainties, combining Kafkaesque unease with Orwellian paranoia and delivering its effects with a power that Mailer has made all his own.

The Deer Park

Amid the cactus wilds some two hudred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D’Or. It is a place for starlets and would be starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic of 1950s Hollywood, Desert D’Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want and how far the are willing to go to get it. The Deer Park is the story of two interlacing love affairs. Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a young ex Air Force pilot whose good looks and air of indifference launch him into the orbit of the radiant actress Lulu Meyers. Charles Eitel is a brilliant director wounded by accusations of communism and whose liaison with the volatile Elena Esposito may supply the coup de grace to his career. As Mailer traces their couplings and uncouplings, their uneasy flirtation with success and self extinction, he creates a legendary portrait of America’s machinery of desire.

Ancient Evenings

Ancient Evenings, a dazzlingly rich, deeply evocative novel, recreates the long lost civilisation of Ancient Egypt. Mailer breathes life into the figures of that era; the eighteenth dynasty Pharaoh Rameses and his wife, Queen Nefertiti; Menenhetet, their creature, lover and victim; and the gods and mortals that surround them in intimate and telepathic communion. His hero, three times reincarnated during the novel, moves in the bright sunlight of white temples, in the exquisite gardens of the royal harem, along the majestic flow of the Nile and in the terrifying clash of battle. An outstanding work of creative imagination, Ancient Evenings displays Mailer’s obsession with magic, violence and eroticism and lives on in the mind long after the last page has been turned.

Tough Guys Don’t Dance

A dark, brilliant novel of astonishing pitch, set in Provincetown, a spit of shrub and dune captured here in the rawness and melancholy of the off season, Tough Guys Don t Dance is the story of Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer addicted to bourbon, cigarettes, and blonde, careless women with money. On the twenty fourth morning after the decampment of his wife, Patty Lareine, he awakens with a hangover, considerable sexual excitement, and, on his upper arm, a red tattoo bearing a name from the past. Of the night before, he remembers practically nothing. What he soon learns is that the front passenger seat of his Porsche is soaked with blood and that in a secluded corner of his mari*juana stash in a nearby woods rests a blonde head, severed at the throat. Is Madden therefore a murderer? He has no way of knowing. As in many novels of crime, the narrative centers on violence physical, sexual, and emotional but these elements move in their orbits through a rich constellation of character as Madden tries to reconstruct the missing hours of a terrible evening. In the course of this in quiry a bizarre and vividly etched gallery of characters reappears to him as in a dream ex prizefighters, sexual junkies, mediums, former cons, a police chief, a world weary former girl friend, and Mad den’s father, old now but still a Herculean figure, a practitioner of the sternest backroom ethics. Tough Guys Don t Dance represents Mailer at the peak of his powers with a stunningly conceived novel that soon transcends its origins as a mystery to become a relentless search into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male. Rarely, as many readers will discern, have the paradoxes of machismo and homosexuality been so well explored.

Harlot’s Ghost

‘The most daring, ambitious and by far the best written of the several very long, daring and ambitious books Norman Mailer has so far produced…
. Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book…
. There can no longer be any doubt that he possesses the largest mind and imagination at work in American literature today.’CHICAGO TRIBUNENarrated by Harry Hubbard, a second generation CIA man, Harlot’s Ghost looks into the depths of the American soul and the soul of Hugh Tremont Montague, code name Harlot, a CIA man obsessed. And Harry is about to discover how far the madness will go and what it means to the Agency and the country…
.A Main Selection of the Book of the Month ClubFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

The Gospel According to the Son

For two thousand years, the brief ministry of a young Nazarene preacher has remained the largest single determinant of Western civilization’s triumphs and disasters. Now, Norman Mailer has written a novel about Jesus’s life. Is God speaking to me? Jesus asks. Or am I hearing voices? If the voices are from God, why has He chosen me as His son? And if they are not from God, then who gave me the power to perform these miracles?It soon becomes evident that we are being told the story of a skilled and most devout carpenter who is living with prodigious questions. The result is an intimately readable account of a man thrust forward by the visions he receives, the sermons he offers, and the miracles he enacts until he comes to the apocalyptic end of his powers. The Gospel According to the Son vividly recreates the world of Galilee and Jerusalem two thousand years ago. In a time of uneasy stability, the Holy Land is governed by a complacent but fearful establishment who rule over a despairing underclass it is a time of great change, open to comparison with our own. Mailer’s signal accomplishment is to create for us a man wholly unlike others who is nonetheless filled with passion and doubt, strength and weakness; a protagonist divine and human, a son of God who shares our condition. In The Gospel According to the Son, one of America’s greatest living writers has brought us a remarkable book by turns bold, thoughtful, poetic, tragic, passionate, and, to our surprise and pleasure, suspenseful. From the Hardcover edition.

The Castle in the Forest

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.

Advertiseme*nts for Myself

Originally published in 1959, Advertiseme*nts for Myself is an inventive collection of stories, essays, polemic, meditations, and interviews. It is Mailer at his brilliant, provocative, outrageous best. Emerging at the height of ‘hip,’ Advertiseme*nts is at once a chronicle of a crucial era in the formation of modern American culture and an important contribution to the great autobiographical tradition in American letters.

The Time Of Our Time

Norman Mailer’s The Time Of Our Time is a giant retrospective, a rich, boisterous portrait of our times seen through the fiction and reportage of one of America’s greatest writers. Mailer selected and edited the contents of this work to create an ongoing narrative of events large and small that have shaped America over the last fifty years. Included are passages from The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park, An American Dream, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song, Ancient Evenings, and Harlot’s Ghost as well as portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald, Madonna, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon as they appeared in some of his best magazine pieces. How readable is the result! It is as if one is being drawn into a fabulous novel with extraordinary characters, real and fictional, who appear and reappear through the years until a vast mural of America as a nation comes into focus, full of follies and blunders, surprisingly elegant and often crazy tragic in its losses and large in its triumphs. On display here are Mailer’s enormous energies, his vast curiosity, and his powers of delineation. Here too are his errors of judgment and deed, both personal and literary. As a writer, Mailer eschews all limits. He goes at the world like a tiger. What will surprise many readers of The Time Of Our Time is what a shrewd and stylish tiger he has been. From the Hardcover edition.

Modest Gifts

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.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago

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.

Why Are We at War?

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.

The Armies of the Night

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

The Faith of Graffiti

‘The Faith is the bible of graffiti. It forever captures the place, the time, and the writings of those of us who made it happen.’ Snake I In 1973, author Norman Mailer teamed with photographer Jon Naar to produce The Faith of Graffiti, a fearless exploration of the birth of the street art movement in New York City. The book coupled Mailer’s essay on the origins and importance of graffiti in modern urban culture with Naar’s radiant, arresting photographs of the young graffiti writers’ work. The result was a powerful, impressionistic account of artistic ferment on the streets of a troubled and changing city and an iconic documentary record of a critical body of work now largely lost to history. This new edition of The Faith of Graffiti, the first in more than three decades, brings this vibrant work the seminal document on the origins of street art to contemporary readers. Photographer Jon Naar has enhanced the original with thirty two pages of additional photographs that are new to this edition, along with an afterword in which he reflects on the project and the meaning it has taken on in the intervening decades. It stands now, as it did then, as a rich survey of a group of outsider artists and the body of work they created and a provocative defense of a generation that questioned the bounds of authority over aesthetics.

The Fight

Norman Mailer’s, ‘The Fight‘ focuses on the 1975 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 monumental egos.

The Executioner’s Song

Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize winning and unforgettable classic about convicted killer Gary Gilmore now in a brand new edition. Arguably the greatest book from America’s most heroically ambitious writer, The Executioner’s Song follows the short, blighted life of Gary Gilmore who became famous after he robbed two men in 1976 and killed them in cold blood. After being tried and convicted, he immediately insisted on being executed for his crime. To do so, he fought a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death. And that fight for the right to die is what made him famous. Mailer tells not only Gilmore’s story, but those of the men and women caught in the web of his life and drawn into his procession toward the firing squad. All with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscape and stern theology of Gilmore’s Utah. The Executioner’s Song is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest source of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement impossible to put down, impossible to forget.

Oswald’s Tale

‘MARVELOUS…
BREATHTAKING.’ The New York Times Book Review’MAILER SHINES…
Explaining Kennedy’s assassination through the flaws in Oswald’s character has been attempted before, notably by Gerald Posner in Case Closed and Don Delillo in Libra. But neither handled Oswald with the kind of dexterity and literary imagination that Mailer here supplies in great force…
. Oswald’s Tale weaves a story not only about Oswald or Kennedy’s death but about the culture surrounding the assassination, one that remains replete with miscomprehensions, unraveled threads and lack of resolution: All of which makes Oswald’s Tale more true to life than any fact driven treatise could hope to be…
. Vintage Mailer.’ The Philadelphia Inquirer’FASCINATING…
A MASTER STORYTELLER…
Mailer gives us our clearest, deepest view of Oswald yet…
. Inside three pages you are utterly absorbed.’ Detroit Free Press’MAILER AT HIS BEST…
LIVELY AND CONVINCING…
EXTREMELY LUCID…
Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance…
. He has found a way to make the dry bones of KGB tapes and his own interviews stand up and perform…
. From the American master conjurer of dark and swirling purpose, a moving reflection.’ Robert Stone The New York Review of Books’THIS IS A NARRATIVE OF TREMENDOUS ENERGY AND PANACHE; THE AUTHOR AT THE TOP OF HIS FORM.’ Christopher Hitchens Financial Times’Mailer has written some pretty crazy books in his time, but this isn’t one of them. Like its predecessor, Harlot’s Ghost, it is the performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity.’ Martin Amis The London Sunday TimesFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

Portrait of Picasso As a Young Man

The author sets out to capture Picasso’s early life in this biography, exploring the originality of his art and ambition. At the heart of the interpretation is Picasso’s first great love, Fernande Olivier, with whom the artist lived for seven years a period which included his most revolutionary works. Fernande is given her own voice by way of excerpts from her candid memoirs. Including the artist’s friendships with Apollonaire and Gertrude Stein, the book evokes the atmosphere of bohemian life in Paris in the early 1900s.

Muhammad Ali: Ringside (With: Joyce Carol Oates)

Perhaps no other figure in recent history has had the wide reaching impact of the man many know simply as The Greatest. For four decades Muhammad Ali has been a symbol of honesty and strength in sports, politics, religion, and civil rights. Throughout his remarkable career, Ali was one who truly had to be seen to be believed. But while Ali’s achievements have frequently been chronicled in prose, never before has his extraordinary career been documented in images. Muhammad Ali: Ringside is dedicated to one of the most popular athlete entertainers of all time. Included are vintage posters and programs, fight tickets, handwritten letters, classic photographs, speeches, scorecards, contracts, and rare autographs, all from Ali’s personal memorabilia. Divided chronologically into four sections, one for each decade from the 1960s to the 1990s, the book includes written narrative recountings of Ali’s accomplishments by noted writers and entertaining quotes from Ali’s contemporaries.

The Spooky Art

Writing is spooky. There is no routine of an office to keep you going, only the blank page eachmorning, and you never know where your words are coming from, those divine words. 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. Mailer explores, among other topics, the use of first person versus third person, the pressing need for discipline, the pitfalls of early success, and the dire matter of coping with bad reviews. While The Spooky Art offers a fascinating preview of what can lie in wait for the student and fledgling writer, the book also has a great deal to say to more advanced writers on the contrary demands of plot and character, the demon writer s block, and the curious ins and outs of publishing. Throughout, Mailer ties in examples from his own career, and reflects on the works of his fellow writers, living and dead Twain, Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway, Updike, Didion, Bellow, Styron, Beckett, and a host of others. In The Spooky Art, Mailer captures the unique untold suffering and exhilaration of the novelist s daily life and, while plotting a clear path for other writers to follow, maintains reverence for the underlying mystery and power of the art.

The Big Empty

‘Questions are posed,’ writes Norman Mailer, ‘in the hope they will open into richer insights, which in turn will bring forth sharper questions.’ In this series of conversations, John Buffalo Mailer, 27, poses a series of questions to his father, challenging the reflections and insights of the man who has dominated and defined much of American letters for the past sixty years.

Their wide ranging discussions take place over the course of a year, beginning in July 2004. Set against the backdrop of George W. Bush’s re election campaign and the war in Iraq, each considers what it means to live in America today. John asks his father to look back to World War II, and explore the parallels that can and cannot be drawn between that time and our current post 9/11 consciousness.

As their conversations develop, the topics shift from the political to the personal to the political again, as they duck and weave around one another. They explore their shared admiration of boxing and poker, the nature of marriage and love, television, movies, writing, and what it means to be a part of this extraordinary family.

On God: An Uncommon Conversation

A towering figure in American literature, Norman Mailer has in recent years reached a new level of accessibility and power. His last novel, The Castle in the Forest, revealed fascinating ideas about faith and the nature of good and evil. Now Mailer offers his concept of the nature of God. His conversations with his friend and literary executor, Michael Lennon, show this writer at his most direct, provocative, and challenging. I think, writes Mailer, that piety is oppressive. It takes all the air out of thought. In moving, amusing, probing, and uncommon dialogues conducted over three years but whose topics he has considered for decades, Mailer establishes his own system of belief, one that rejects both organized religion and atheism. He presents instead a view of our world as one created by an artistic God who often succeeds but can also fail in the face of determined opposition by contrary powers in the universe, with whom war is waged for the souls of humans. In turn, we have been given freedom indeed responsibility to choose our own paths. Mailer trusts that our individual behavior always a complex mix of good and evil will be rewarded or punished with a reincarnation that fits the sum of our lives. Mailer weighs the possibilities of intelligent design at the same time avowing that sensual pleasures were bestowed on us by God; he finds fault with the Ten Commandments because adultery, he avers, may be a lesser evil than others suffered in a bad marriage and he holds that technology was the Devil’s most brilliant creation. In short, Mailer is original and unpredictable in this inspiring verbal journey, a unique vision of the world in which God needs us as much as we need God. From The Naked and the Dead to The Executioner s Song and beyond, Mailer s major works have engaged such themes as war, politics, culture, and sex. Now, in this small yet important book, Mailer, in a modest, well spoken style, gives us fresh ways to think about the largest subject of them all.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment