Authors > Norman Mailer

Oswald's Tale

Norman Mailer fashions an unprecedented portrait of one of the great villains--and enigmas--in United States history. Here is Lee Harvey Oswald--his family background, troubled marriage, controversial journey to Russia, and return to an America. Based on KGB and FBI transcripts, government reports, letters and diaries, this is an epic account of a man whose cunning, duplicity, and self-invention were both at home in and at odds with the country he forever altered.

Year: 1995
Genre: True Crime

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.

Year: 1979
Genre: Death Row, True Crime

The Naked and The Dead

Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an army platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the possession of the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Focusing on the experiences of a fourteen-man platoon stationed on a Japanese-held island in the South Pacific during World War II, and written in a journalistic style, it tells the moving story of the soldiers' struggle to retain a sense of dignity amidst the horror of warfare, and to find a source of meaning in their lives.

Year: 1948
Genre: World War II, WWII: Pacific Theater

Tough Guys Don't Dance

Norman Mailer peers into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male in a brilliant crime novel that transcends genre. When Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer living on Cape Cod, awakes with a gruesome hangover, a painful tattoo on his upper arm, and a severed female head in his marijuana stash, he has almost no memory of the night before.

Year: 1984
Genre: Murder Mystery

See Also:
• Truman Capote
• Tom Wolfe