Norman Mailer at the NYS Writers Institute in 2007

An excerpt from an interview with Norman Mailer who appeared at the New York State Writers Institute in 2007. Mailer, a formidable presence in American letters for nearly six decades, is the author of novels, creative nonfiction, short stories, essays, and screenplays. His novel The Castle in the Forest (2007), is a fictional chronicle of Adolf Hitler's boyhood. The book is narrated by Dieter, a devil assigned by Satan to nurture young Adolf. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it a "compelling portrait of a monstrous soul." Mailer's previous novel was The Gospel According to the Son (1997), a retelling of the Gospels from Jesus's point of view. Mailer received the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968), a classic of the "New Journalism" genre. He received a second Pulitzer Prize for The Executioner's Song (1979), a "true life novel" about convicted killer Gary Gilmore. A perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mailer received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters of the National Book Foundation in 2005.

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People & Blogs

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• Fiction
• Nonfiction