"Mailer wrote almost 50,000 letters over the course of his life, keeping a copy of almost every one of them. He corresponded with presidents and politicians, artists and athletes, writers and editors, students, antagonists, fans, friends, his children, his loves, including his beloved sixth wife, Norris Church Mailer. Here are the letters of a precocious sixteen-year-old arriving from Brooklyn at Harvard. Here are the letters depicting the horrors...

"Norman Mailer at 100 celebrates the author's centennial in 2023 and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of his bestselling debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, by illustrating how Mailer remains a still provocative presence in American letters. Novelist and Mailer scholar Robert J. Begiebing lays out the extent to which the polymath author's work makes vital contributions to the larger American literary landscape from the debates of...

On April 30, 1971, a standing-room-only crowd of New York₂s intellectual elite packed the city₂s Town Hall theater to see Norman Mailer, fresh from the controversy over his essay ₁The Prisoner of Sex₂ and the backlash it received from leaders of the women₂s movement, tangle with a panel of four prominent female thinkers and activists: Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Diana Trilling.

"Norman Mailer was writing The Executioner's Song, his novel about condemned killer Gary Gilmore, when he struck up a correspondence with Jack Henry Abbott, Federal Prisoner 87098-132. Over time, Abbott convinced the famous author that he was a talented writer who deserved another chance at freedom. With letters of support from Mailer and other literary elites of the day, Abbott was released on parole in 1981. With Mailer's help, Abbott quickly became...

"In the winter of 1969, the bodies of four young women were discovered in a cemetery near the tip of Cape Cod. In a place once known as Helltown, the victims had been shot, stabbed, dismembered, and mutilated. As investigators would soon learn, the perpetrator was a young, handsome, serial killer named Tony Costa. A bizarre former taxidermist with a split personality and penchant for violence, Costa ultimately mobilized friends in the hippie community...