Vorab-RezensentenNorman Mailer

A genuine literary event—an illuminating collection of correspondence from one of the most acclaimed American writers of all time Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 30 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific—or more exposed—than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence (approximately 20 million words), many of them deeply personal, keeping a copy of almost every one. Now the best of these are published—most for the first time—in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and, it seems, several lifetimes. Together they form a stunning autobiographical portrait of one of the most original, provocative, and outspoken public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Compiled by Mailer’s authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and organized by decade, Selected Letters of Norman Mailer features the most fascinating of Mailer’s missives from 1940 to 2007—letters to his family and friends, to fans and fellow writers (including Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth), to political figures from Henry Kissinger to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and to such cultural icons as John Lennon, Marlon Brando, and even Monica Lewinsky. Here is Mailer the precocious Harvard undergraduate, writing home to his parents for the first time and worrying that his acceptances by literary magazines were “all happening too easy.” Here, too, is Mailer the soldier, confronting the violence of war in the Pacific, which would become the subject of his masterly debut novel, The Naked and the Dead: “[I’m] amazed how casually it fits into . . . daily life, how very unhorrible it all is.” Mailer the international celebrity pledges to William Styron, “I’m going to write every day, and like Lot’s Wife I’m consigning myself to a pillar of salt if I dare to look back,” while the 1980s Mailer agonizes over the fallout from his ill-fated friendship with Jack Henry Abbott, the murderer who became his literary protégé. (“The continuation of our relationship was depressing for both of us,” he confesses to Joyce Carol Oates.) At last, he finds domestic—and erotic—bliss in the arms of his sixth wife, Norris Church (“We bounce into each other like sunlight”). Whether he is reflecting on the Kennedy assassination, assessing the merits of authors from Fitzgerald to Proust, or threatening to pummel William Styron, the brilliant, pugnacious Norman Mailer comes alive again in these letters. The myriad faces of this artist and activist, lover and fighter, public figure and private man, are laid bare in this collection as never before.

1968. The Vietnam War was raging. President Lyndon Johnson, facing a challenge in his own Democratic party from the maverick anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy, announced that he would not seek a second term. In April, Martin Luther King 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 controversial Richard Nixon as their candidate, while in September, Democrats in Chicago backed the ineffectual Vice President Hubert Humphrey. TVs across the country showed anti-war protestors filling the streets of Chicago and the police running amok, beating and arresting demonstrators and delegates alike. Forty years after 1968, the year still looms as a decisive one in modern American politics, a year of cultural and political revolution and counter-revolution, from which arose today's bitterly divided country. 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. Mailer describes the fall of Rockefeller and the liberal Republicans while capturing the tinsel gleam of rising star Ronald Reagan. He confronts the stupefying pageantry of Miami and the mayhem in Chicago. He presents sharply-etched yet strikingly nuanced portaits of the complicated, ominous Richard Nixon and the enigmatic Eugene McCarthy. He shows himself struggling to do his job in the new mediated world of TV and expresses his sorrow, fear, fury, and pity at seeing his country nearing collapse. Miami and the Siege of Chicago is a great book not only about 1968, but about America.