Harlot's Ghost
This sprawling narrative (1200 pages in paper, 1400 in cloth) is only the first part of Mailer's projected masterwork on mid-20th century America through the prism of the CIA. Narrator Harry Hubbard grew up in the shadow of the agency, marries the cool patrician ex-wife of his powerful, scary mentor in the Company, Hugh Tremont Montague ("Harlot"), and she in turn cheats on Harry with brash operative Dix Butler. Most of the story concerns Harry's early w... Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery
Lee Harvey Oswald is known as the man who killed President John F. Kennedy, but who was Oswald as a person? What do people really know about him? Oswald was an American who defected to the Soviet Union, while there he remained under constant KGB surveillance, married a Communist woman, and became a Communist himself. He wanted President Kennedy to leave Fidel Castro alone, rather than plotting to overthrow him.
Oswald was an ambitious young ma... Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
Norman Mailer's biography of Picasso follows the famous artist from his gifted childhood in Spain through his travails as a young man in the Parisian art community to his establishment as one of the world's most famous artists. Pablo Picasso is born in Andalusian Spain in 1881. Mailer's biography covers the legend of his birth: a stillborn child brought back to life when his uncle breathes tobacco smoke into his lungs. The rest of the book appropriates m... The Armies of the Night
"The Armies of the Night" is Norman Mailer's first hand account of the events surrounding the march on the Pentagon in Washington D.C. in the fall of 1967. He begins by quoting a news story from "Time" which speaks of his drunken behavior at an event the night before, and then goes on to say that he wants to tell what really happened. Essentially he explains his actions during that weekend as an attempt to wake people out of their lethargy about the wa...
