Marilyn

Norman Mailer was born in New Jersey in 1923 and then reared in Brooklyn. He began writing fiction before he graduated from Harvard University. His first major work, The Naked and the Dead, written in 1948, was received with great popular and critical acclaim. Mailer went on to win the Pulitzer Prize on two occasions, the first in 1968 with The Armies of the Night; the second in 1979 with The Executioner's Song. He was once acclaimed by poet Robert Lowell as 'the best journalist in America'. Mailer died in 2007.

Marilyn is … genius. Up to now we’ve had mostly contradictory views of Monroe. With his fox’s ingenuity, Mailer puts her together and shows how she might have been torn apart ... Marilyn is great as only a great writer using his brains and feelers could make it ... a runaway string of perceptions ... You read him with a heightened consciousness because his performance has zing. It’s the star system in literature; you can feel him bucking for the big time, and when he starts flying it’s so exhilarating you want to applaud ...This brilliant book ... a feat.