Selected Letters of Norman 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 .