Norman Mailer: Works and Days

by J. Michael Lennon

This volume is the product of over-twenty years of collecting, collating, cross-referencing, and confirming over 1500 bibliographical and biographical entries on one of 20th-century America's most outspoken auteurs. J. Michael and Donna Lennon published the original Works and Days in 2000 to a strong critical reception, and this new, revised edition adds to that excellent volume with over 400 new entries, an expanded bibliography, and many photos, the majority in full-color. Works and Days continues the endeavors of those scholars who came before and seeks to become the gold-standard of Mailer resources. "This book, a summa of scholarship, is the beneficiary of the extensive research that went into Michael Lennon and Donna Lennon’s Norman A Double Life and Norman Selected Letters . Works and Days is structured on the cycle of the calendar, and the scenic narration of key events in the author’s life is studded with surprising links. Perhaps 1500 ‘items,’ dated and placed, shuffle in and out of view. Coupled with this narrative are bibliographies, appendices, and an evaluative survey of key writings about Mailer. The index identifies major and minor movers and shakers, and outlines the broad cultural world that Mailer so deeply immersed himself in. This fully revised edition is so richly cross-referenced that the web of sources becomes tightly meshed together, spring-like, with clusters of questions and comment about an issue or event.” —Christopher Busa, Provincetown Arts “One comes away from this volume with a new, enlarged sense of Mailer’s literary accomplishment. No one doing serious work on Mailer will be able to avoid Works and Days —an impressive (and ever-evolving) monument to the man and his work.” —Robert Begiebing, The Mailer Review , 2019.

468 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2018