Marilyn: A Biography

by Norman Mailer

Overview

An extraordinary biography of the legendary screen star Marilyn Monroe (originally published in 1973) by Norman Mailer, one of America's most important writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Mailer, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, was the first writer to explore the relationship between Monroe and Bobby Kennedy. When first published, this book was the subject of Time and Life magazine cover stories, was on The New York Times Bestseller List and became a full selection of the Book of the Month Club.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013131156
Publisher:	Polaris Communications
Publication date:	07/25/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	315 KB

About the Author

Norman Mailer was one of the most important American writers of the post-WWII era and a leading public intellectual since the 1960s. The author of more than forty books, he is one of the most prolific American authors of the 20th century. The Castle in the Forest, last novel, was the eleventh of his books to appear on the New York Times bestseller list. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), which was on the Times list for 63 weeks, is considered to be the premier novel of WWII in the Pacific and has never gone out of print.

The cofounder and namer of The Village Voice, he has written columns for the Voice, Esquire, Commentary and Vanity Fair. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner's Song and is the only person to win Pulitzers in fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books have been nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the NBA Foundation in 2006.

He was President of the American Chapter of PEN from 1984 to 1985 and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 1984 until his death in November 2007. Mailer was the father of nine children and ten grandchildren, and lived in New York and Provincetown with his sixth wife, the novelist and painter, Norris Church Mailer.

Hometown:

Provincetown, Massachusetts, and New York, New York

Date of Birth:

January 31, 1923

Date of Death:

November 10, 2007

Place of Birth:

Long Branch, New Jersey

Education:

B.S., Harvard University, 1943; Sorbonne, Paris, 1947-48

Editorial Reviews

“Phosphorescent writing.”

The Washington Post

“At its best, superb, muscular prose…. Nothing else captures [Marilyn’s] endearing and exasperating persona so touchingly.”

George Frazier

“A book of gargantuan propensities . . . incalculable in impact. . . . There are brilliant passages . . . compulsively readable.”

Time magazine

“About half of MARILYN is great as only a great writer, using his brains and feelers could make it. . . . His writing is close to the pleasures of movies. . . . Your read [Mailer] with a heightened consciousness because his performance has zing.”

Pauline Kael