Norman Mailer’s Bestsellers
In six decades of work, Norman Mailer made the best seller list with eleven of his books, more than any other post-war American writer.
On June 20, 1948, a Pacific war novel by a twenty-five year-old combat veteran from Brooklyn reached the number one position on the New York Times best-seller list. It remained on the list for sixty-two consecutive weeks, nineteen of them in the number one spot. After The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer never again made the first position on the Times list. But ten more of his books — eight of them novels — over six decades made the list, including his last novel, The Castle in the Forest. It reached number five on February 11, 2007, shortly after Mailer’s eighty-fourth birthday on January 31, and less than a year before his death on November 10.
No other major American writer of the post-war generation can boast of publishing best-selling novels over such a span of years, fifty-nine in Mailer’s case. Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal come closest. Bellow’s first best-seller was The Adventures of Augie March in 1953; his last was Ravelstein, which made it for a week in May 2000, when Bellow was eighty-five. Vidal, born in 1925, had a chance to pass Mailer, but his last novel, The Golden Age, appeared in 2000, and he died in 2012. His third novel, The City and the Pillar, spent eight weeks on the Times list in 1947. His last best seller was Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal, which spent two weeks on the list in 2002. Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth could surpass Mailer’s record, but have a way to go, and Roth has announced that he has given up writing. Their first best sellers appeared in 1973 and 1962, respectively.
Over the fifty-nine year period, Mailer’s books, including two nonfiction narratives, Marilyn: A Novel Biography (1973), and The Executioner’s Song (1979), have spent a total of 160 weeks on the list. Song followed Naked’s sixty-two weeks with twenty-five, reaching number three in January 1980. This standing is the highest rung reached by any of his ten books that made the list after Naked. Song is generally considered to be Mailer’s second most popular book, as well as one of his most critically acclaimed. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. Mailer’s other Pulitzer Prize winner, The Armies of the Night (1968), never made the best seller list, despite receiving the best reviews of any of his books, better even than those of Naked. Armies also won the National Book Award in the arts and letters category.
Following is a list of Mailer’s eleven best sellers, the number of weeks spent on the Times list, and the highest rung attained.
- The Naked and the Dead (1948) — 62 no. 1
- Barbary Shore (1951) — 3 no. 11
- The Deer Park (1955) — 15 no. 6
- An American Dream (1965) — 6 no. 8
- Marilyn: A Novel Biography (1973) — 9 no. 6
- The Executioner’s Song (1979) — 25 no. 3
- Ancient Evenings (1983) — 17 no. 6
- Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984) — 10 no. 5
- Harlot’s Ghost (1991) — 4 no. 12
- The Gospel According to the Son (1997) — 6 no. 7
- The Castle in the Forest (2007) — 3 no. 5
It is sometimes glibly claimed by “assorted bravos of the media and the literary world,” as they are referred to in Armies (14), that Mailer indulged in too many extra-curricular pursuits — running for mayor of New York, making experimental films, writing columns for various periodicals, boxing, appearing on talk shows, protesting the Vietnam War, lecturing at colleges, etc. — and thus lessened his literary achievement. His forty-plus books and six decades of best sellers, most of them critically acclaimed, belie this canard.
J. Michael Lennon is Norman Mailer’s archivist, editor, and authorized biographer and has written/edited several books about him, including (with
Donna Pedro Lennon) Norman Mailer: Works and Days (2000), Critical Essays on Norman Mailer (1986), Conversations With Norman Mailer (1988), The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing (2003), and numerous essays in journals and magazines. His work has appeared in New Yorker, Paris Review, Playboy, Provincetown Arts, New York, Modern Fiction Studies, New England Review, Narrative, and Journal of Modern Literature, among others. His latest book, co-authored with Mailer, is On God: An Uncommon Conversation (October 2007). Lennon is currently editing Mailer’s letters and researching the biography. Lennon’s documentary, James Jones: From Reveille to Taps, was shown on PBS in 1985. He is Emeritus Vice President for Academic Affairs and Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University, where he continues to teach in the MFA Program, and is President of The Norman Mailer Society.
The Mailer Review, Vol. 2 No. 1, Fall 2008. Copyright © 2008. The Norman Mailer Society. Published by The Norman Mailer Society.
