How Norman Mailer changed the face of biography
Many labels leap to mind in association with the prolific and controversial Norman Mailer, who died in 2007, but “biographer” is not typically one of them. He was not considered a serious practitioner of the genre in the same sense as Edmund Morris, Ron Chernow or his friend Doris Kearns Goodwin. And yet, as his own official biographer J. Michael Lennon asserts to me, “Mailer became a major biographer in the last half of his career.” Thirty years ago, two intriguing books by Mailer appeared just a few months apart: Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery and Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man.
