Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Naked and the Dead | 1948 |
| Barbary Shore | 1951 |
| The Deer Park | 1955 |
| An American Dream | 1965 |
| Why Are We in Vietnam? | 1967 |
| A Transit to Narcissus | 1978 |
| Of Women and Their Elegance | 1980 |
| Ancient Evenings | 1983 |
| Tough Guys Don’t Dance | 1984 |
| Harlot’s Ghost | 1991 |
| The Gospel According to the Son | 1997 |
| The Castle in the Forest | 2007 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer | 1967 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The White Negro | 1959 |
| Advertisements for Myself | 1959 |
| The Presidential Papers | 1963 |
| Cannibals and Christians | 1966 |
| The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer | 1967 |
| The Armies of the Night | 1968 |
| Miami and the Siege of Chicago | 1968 |
| Of a Fire on the Moon | 1971 |
| King of the Hill: Norman Mailer on the Fight of the Century | 1971 |
| The Prisoner of Sex | 1971 |
| Existential Errands | 1972 |
| St. George and the Godfather | 1972 |
| Marilyn: A Biography | 1973 |
| The Faith of Graffiti | 1974 |
| The Fight | 1975 |
| Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller | 1976 |
| The Executioner’s Song | 1979 |
| Pieces and Pontifications | 1982 |
| Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery | 1995 |
| Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man | 1995 |
| The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing | 2003 |
| Why Are We at War? | 2003 |
| The Big Empty (With: John Buffalo Mailer) | 2006 |
| On God: An Uncommon Conversation (With: J. Michael Lennon) | 2007 |
| Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays | 2013 |
| Selected Letters of Norman Mailer | 2014 |
| Lipton’s: A Marijuana Journal | 2024 |
About Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer (1923 to 2007) was an American novelist and journalist whose first novel, “The Naked and the Dead”, made him famous at 25. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for “The Armies of the Night” and for “The Executioner’s Song”.
Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on 31 January 1923 and grew up in Brooklyn. He entered Harvard in 1939 at the age of 16 to study engineering, took writing courses as electives, and published his first story at 18. After graduating in 1943 he was drafted into the United States Army and served in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry, where he went on reconnaissance patrols, and later in occupied Japan.
He drew on that service and on his letters home for “The Naked and the Dead” (1948), which centres on a long patrol behind enemy lines. It spent 62 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. “Barbary Shore” (1951) was poorly received, and “The Deer Park” (1955), based on his time as a Hollywood screenwriter, was turned down by seven publishers before Putnam’s took it. In 1955 he was one of the founders of The Village Voice.
From the late 1950s Mailer became as well known for non-fiction as for novels, and he is regarded as one of the originators of the New Journalism. “The Armies of the Night” (1968) won both the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and the National Book Award. Other reportage covered the 1968 political conventions, the Apollo 11 mission in “Of a Fire on the Moon”, and the 1974 Ali and Foreman fight in “The Fight”. “The Executioner’s Song” (1979), about the life and execution of the murderer Gary Gilmore, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
His later novels were long and varied in subject. “Ancient Evenings” (1983) is set in Egypt around 1100 BC, and “Harlot’s Ghost” (1991) is a 1,310-page novel about the CIA. He adapted and directed the 1987 film of his thriller “Tough Guys Don’t Dance”. His private and public life drew as much attention as his books: in 1960 he was convicted of assault after stabbing his second wife, Adele Morales, and in 1969 he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York.
Mailer’s final novel, “The Castle in the Forest”, about Hitler’s childhood, was published in January 2007. He died in New York on 10 November 2007. A journal he kept in the mid 1950s was published in 2024 as “Lipton’s: A Marijuana Journal”.
Photo: Bernard Gotfryd (Library of Congress), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).