A
new book takes a probing look at how one of the most famous writers of the past
50 years contributed to the murder of a budding writer. I read a story about it in the New York Daily
News and it sounds wild.
Jack
and Norman by Jerome Loving is the true story of how Norman Mailer, who won a
Pulitzer Prize for The Executioner’s Song,
a novel based on the true story of a killer – Gary Gilmore – a killer who
demanded his own execution. While researching his book on Gilmore he was
contacted by Jack Henry Abbott, a lifetime criminal born to a shiftless dad and
a prostitute mother. Mailer would
befriend the prisoner because he gave him insight into Gilmore’s jailhouse
existence.
Mailer
helped Abbott get a book published, In
the Belly of the Beast, through Random House, featuring letters from prison.
He also lobbied to get Abbott out of prison, even though he’d killed a fellow
inmate.
Within
weeks of his release he killed again, this time a promising young writer. The very
next day his book received a glowing review in The New York Times.
You
just can’t make this up.
It’s
a fascinating story about justice, the death penalty, the limits of
well-intentioned activism and perhaps the blur of reality and causational
fiction of writers.
Mailer,
who once wrote a book about Marilyn Monroe, almost was in prison himself. He once stabbed his second wife in a drunken
rage, narrowly missing her heart. She
declined to press charges, however.
Writers
will do a lot to practice their art.
Some of the best books come based on the horrors, losses, failures and
mental illness of the writer. In this
case, Mailer became the story that he never intended to write or be written
about.
Reading
about Mailer made me curious about his career.
I’ve heard about him from time to time but admittedly was not familiar
with his life and words. Here’s a
summary from what I quickly gleaned online:
The
American, novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, filmmaker, actor, and
political activist lived to be 84.
One
of his books, Armies of the Night, won
a National Book Award. He was considered
an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism.
In
1955, he founded The Village Voice.
He
wrote 12 novels over a six-decade career.
The Naked and the Dead, a NYT
best-seller for 62 weeks, was ranked by the Modern Library as one of the 100
best novels in English.
He
penned a famous essay in 1957, The White
Negro.
He
wrote articles for many leading publications including Esquire, Harper’s magazine,
and Playboy. He and
Playboy actually lost a million-dollar libel lawsuit in the 1970’s for an article that he wrote about a boxer
Elmo Henderson, who had defeated Muhammad Ali.
He’s
written books about Ali, Pablo Picasso, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Mailer,
buried in Provincetown, MA was a two-time Pulitzer-Prize author. His papers can be found at the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin.
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