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Brooklyn, New York
Coordinates: 40°41′34″N 73°59′25″W / 40.69278°N 73.99028°W / 40.69278; -73.99028
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with approximately 2.5 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, after New York County (Manhattan). It is also the westernmost county on Long Island.
Brooklyn was an independent city until it was annexed by New York City in 1898. It continues to maintain a distinct culture. Many Brooklyn neighborhoods are ethnic enclaves where particular ethnic groups and cultures predominate.
Brooklyn's official motto is Eendraght Maeckt Maght. Written in the (early modern spelling of the) Dutch language, it is inspired by the motto of the United Dutch Provinces and translated "Unity makes strength". The motto is displayed on the borough seal and flag, which also feature a young robed woman bearing fasces, a traditional emblem of republicanism. Brooklyn's official colors are blue and gold.
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Egypt
Egypt
i/ˈiːdʒɪpt/ (Arabic: مصر, Miṣr, Egyptian Arabic: [mɑsˤɾ] ; Coptic: Ⲭⲏⲙⲓ, Kīmi ; Sahidic Coptic: ⲕⲏⲙⲉ, Kēme), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: 
جمهوريّة مصر العربيّة (help·info), is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world. Covering an area of about 1,010,000 square kilometers (390,000 sq mi), Egypt is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south and Libya to the west.
Egypt is one of the most populous countries in Africa and the Middle East. The great majority of its over 81 million people live near the banks of the Nile River, in an area of about 40,000 square kilometers (15,000 sq mi), where the only arable land is found. The large areas of the Sahara Desert are sparsely inhabited. About half of Egypt's residents live in urban areas, with most spread across the densely populated centres of greater Cairo, Alexandria and other major cities in the Nile Delta.
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FBI
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is a governmental agency belonging to the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency (counterintelligence). Also, it is the government agency responsible for investigating crimes on Indian Reservations in the United States under the Major Crimes Act. The branch has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime.
The agency was established in 1908 as the Bureau of Investigation (BOI). Its name was changed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1935.
The agency headquarters is the J. Edgar Hoover Building, located in Washington, D.C.. The agency has fifty-six field offices located in major cities throughout the United States, and more than 400 resident agencies in lesser cities and areas across the nation. More than 50 international offices called "legal attachés" exist in U.S. embassies and consulates general worldwide.
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Harvard University
Harvard University is an American private Ivy League research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country. Harvard's history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Harvard was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard. Although never formally affiliated with a church, the college primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Harvard's curriculum and students became secular throughout the 18th century and by the 19th century had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's forty year tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a centralized research university, and Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College. Drew Gilpin Faust was elected the 28th president in 2007 and is the first woman to lead the university. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $32 billion as of September 2011.
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Iran
Coordinates: 32°N 53°E / 32°N 53°E / 32; 53
Iran (i/ɪˈrɑːn/ or /aɪˈræn/;Persian: ایران [ʔiˈɾɒn] (
listen)), officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (Persian: جمهوری اسلامی ایران Jomhuri-ye Eslāmi-ye Irān), is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran", which in Persian means "Land of the Aryans", has been in use natively since the Sassanian era. It came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia ( /ˈpɜrʒə/ or /ˈpɜrʃə/). Both "Persia" and "Iran" are used interchangeably in cultural contexts; however, "Iran" is the name used officially in political contexts.
The 18th-largest country in the world in terms of area at 1,648,195 km2 (636,372 sq mi), Iran has a population of around 79 million. It is a country of particular geopolitical significance owing to its location in the Middle East and central Eurasia. Iran is bordered on the north by Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. As Iran is a littoral state of the Caspian Sea, which is an inland sea, Kazakhstan and Russia are also Iran's direct neighbors to the north. Iran is bordered on the east by Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, on the west by Iraq and on the northwest by Turkey. Tehran is the capital, the country's largest city and the political, cultural, commercial and industrial center of the nation. Iran is a regional power, and holds an important position in international energy security and world economy as a result of its large reserves of petroleum and natural gas. Iran has the second largest proven natural gas reserves in the world and the fourth largest proven petroleum reserves.
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Manhattan
Manhattan (/mænˈhætən/) is the most densely populated and the oldest of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the U.S. state of New York. The borough and county consist of Manhattan Island and several small adjacent islands: Roosevelt Island, Randall's Island, Wards Island, Governors Island, Liberty Island, part of Ellis Island,Mill Rock, and U Thant Island; as well as Marble Hill, a very small area on the mainland bordering the Bronx. The original city of New York began at the southern end of Manhattan, expanded northward, and then between 1874 and 1898, annexed land from surrounding counties.
The New York County is the most densely populated county in the United States, and one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with a 2010 population of 1,585,873 living in a land area of 22.96 square miles (59.5 km2), or 69,464 residents per square mile (26,924/km²), more dense than any individual American city. It is also one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, with a 2005 per capita income above $100,000. Manhattan is the third-largest of New York's five boroughs in population, and its smallest borough in land area.
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New Jersey
New Jersey (i/nuː ˈdʒɜrzi/) is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the U.S. state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania, and on the southwest by Delaware. New Jersey is the 4th least extensive, but the 11th most populous and the most densely populated of the 50 United States. New Jersey lies mostly within the sprawling metropolitan areas of New York City and Philadelphia. It is also the third wealthiest by 2009–2010 median household income.
The area was inhabited by Native Americans for more than 2,800 years, with historical tribes such as the Lenape along the coast. In the early 17th century, the Dutch and the Swedes made the first European settlements. The British later seized control of the region, naming it the Province of New Jersey. It was granted as a colony to Sir George Carteret and John Berkeley, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton. At this time, it was named after the largest of the British Channel Islands, Jersey, Carteret's birthplace. New Jersey was the site of several decisive battles during the American Revolutionary War.
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Philippines
The Philippines
i/ˈfɪlɨpiːnz/ FI-lə-peenz (Filipino: Pilipinas [ˌpɪlɪˈpinɐs]), officially known as the Republic of the Philippines (Filipino: Republika ng Pilipinas) is a sovereign country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam. The Sulu Sea to the southwest lies between the country and the island of Borneo, and to the south the Celebes Sea separates it from other islands of Indonesia. It is bounded on the east by the Philippine Sea. Its location on the Pacific Ring of Fire and its tropical climate make the Philippines prone to earthquakes and typhoons but have also endowed the country with natural resources and made it one of the richest areas of biodiversity in the world. An archipelago comprising 7,107 islands, the Philippines is categorized broadly into three main geographical divisions: Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. Its capital city is Manila.
With an estimated population of about 98 million people, the Philippines is the 7th most populated Asian country and the 12th most populated country in the world. An additional 12.5 million Filipinos live overseas. Multiple ethnicities and cultures are found throughout the islands. In prehistoric times, Negritos were some of the archipelago's earliest inhabitants. They were followed by successive waves of Austronesian peoples who brought with them influences from Malay, Hindu, and Islamic societies. Trade introduced Chinese cultural influences which remain to this day.
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University of Paris
The University of Paris (French: Université de Paris) was a university located in Paris, France, and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid-12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250. After many changes, including a century of suspension (1793–1896), it ceased to exist in 1970 and 13 autonomous universities (University of Paris I–XIII) were created from it. The university is often referred to as the Sorbonne or La Sorbonne after the collegiate institution (Collège de Sorbonne) founded about 1257 by Robert de Sorbon. In fact, the university as such was older and was never completely centered on the Sorbonne. Of the 13 current successor universities, the first four have a presence in the historical Sorbonne building, and three include "Sorbonne" in their names.
The universities in Paris are now essentially independent of each other, and some fall under the Académie of Créteil or the Académie of Versailles rather than the Académie of Paris. Some residual administrative functions of the 13 universities are formally supervised by a common chancellor, the Rector of the Académie of Paris, with offices in the Sorbonne. As of 2006, Maurice Quénet is the Rector of the Academy of Paris and Chancellor of the Universities of Paris. The Vice-Chancellor of the Universities of Paris is Pierre Gregory. Despite this link, and the historical ties, there is no University of Paris system that binds the universities at an academic level.
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Adele Morales
Adele Morales (b. 1925 in New York City) is an American painter and memoirist; she is best known as the second wife of American author-playwright Norman Mailer.
Morales was descended from a Spanish mother and Native Peruvian father; she grew up in Bensonhurst but moved to Manhattan, where she studied painting with Hans Hofmann and took up a Bohemian lifestyle, being involved for several years with Edwin Fancher (who together with Mailer and Dan Wolf founded The Village Voice) and briefly with Jack Kerouac. Mailer's biographer Mary Dearborn says of those days:
Adele thrived in the city. She frequented the Village bars, especially those, like the San Remo and the Cedar Tavern, favored by artists and writers, and she dressed in fantastic, gypsylike outfits. By all accounts, she had extraordinary physical presence. With striking dark good looks and a beautiful body, she seemed to exude sexuality. (It was widely known that her lingerie was ordered from Frederick's of Hollywood.)
In 1951 she moved in with Mailer in an apartment upstairs from Wolf's, on First Avenue near Second Street in Greenwich Village; they were married in 1954 and lived in a "loft on Monroe Street in the shadows of the Manhattan Bridge," which became a "popular salon" for the New York intelligentsia. But after visiting Paris in the summer of 1956 Mailer and Morales decided to leave New York; Mailer wrote "the city was not alive for me. I was on edge. My wife was pregnant. It seemed abruptly too punishing to live at the pace we had been going for several years." In the fall of 1956 they moved to a rented "sprawling white saltbox farmhouse" in Bridgewater, Connecticut, near a literary and artistic community that included Arthur Miller and William Styron in nearby Roxbury.
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Alice Walker
Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender. She is best known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. Her father, who was, in her words, "wonderful at math but a terrible farmer," earned only $300 a year from sharecropping and dairy farming. Her mother supplemented the family income by working as a maid. She worked 11 hours a day for USD $17 per week to help pay for Alice to attend college.
Living under Jim Crow Laws, Walker's parents resisted landlords who expected the children of black sharecroppers to work the fields at a young age. A white plantation owner said to her that black people had “no need for education.” Minnie Lou Walker said, "You might have some black children somewhere, but they don’t live in this house. Don’t you ever come around here again talking about how my children don’t need to learn how to read and write.” Her mother enrolled Alice in first grade at the age of four.
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Alison Lurie
Alison Lurie (born September 3, 1926) is an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she has also written numerous non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress.
Lurie was born in Chicago but grew up in White Plains, New York, the daughter of Bernice (Stewart) and Harry Lawrence Lurie, a Latvian-born professor. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1947. The next year she married Jonathan Peale Bishop, then a graduate student at Harvard. Bishop was a critic and essayist who, in the 1970s and later, became a writer of autobiographically-inflected books about Catholic Christianity. He taught at Amherst College, in Massachusetts (1957–61), and then at Cornell University (1961-). Lurie moved along with him. Lurie and Bishop have three sons; they divorced in 1985 after a long separation. She is currently married to the writer Edward Hower. She spends part of her time in London, part at Cornell, and part in Key West.
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Andrew O'Hagan
Andrew O'Hagan, FRSL (born 1968) is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author. He is also an Editor at Large of Esquire and is currently a creative writing fellow at King's College London. He was selected by the literary magazine Granta for inclusion in their 2003 list of the top 20 young British novelists. His novels appear translated into 15 languages. His essays, reports and stories have appeared in The London Review of Books, New York Review of Books,Granta, The Guardian, and The New Yorker.
O'Hagan was born in Glasgow, and grew up in Kilwinning, North Ayrshire. He is of Irish Catholic descent and attended St Michael's Academy in Kilwinning before studying at the University of Strathclyde.
In 1991, O'Hagan joined the staff of the London Review of Books, where he worked for four years.
In 1995, he published his first book, The Missing, to considerable critical acclaim. The book crosses genres by exploring the lives of people who have gone missing in Britain and the families left behind. The Missing was shortlisted for three literary awards.
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Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler (born October 25, 1941) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.
The eldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father was a chemist and her mother a social worker. Her early childhood was spent in a succession of Quaker communities in the mountains of North Carolina and in Raleigh. She didn't attend a school until she was 11 and this unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view "the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise".
She graduated at 19 from Duke University, and completed graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University in New York City. She worked as a librarian and bibliographer before moving to Maryland.
She is noteworthy among contemporary best-selling novelists, for she rarely grants face-to-face interviews or does book tours, nor does she make many other public appearances, although she has made herself available through email interviews.
Tyler's ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which she considers her best work, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1983. Her tenth novel, The Accidental Tourist, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. Her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. She has edited three anthologies: The Best American Short Stories 1983, Best of the South, and Best of the South: The Best of the Second Decade.
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Ariel Durant
Ariel Durant (10 May 1898 — 25 October 1981) was the co-author of The Story of Civilization.
Durant was born in Proskurov (now Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine) as Chaya Kaufman to Ethel Appel Kaufman and Joseph Kaufman. The family emigrated to the United States in 1901. She met her future husband, Will Durant, while a student at Ferrer Modern School in New York. Will was a teacher at the school at the time, but resigned his post in order to marry Ariel. She was fifteen at the time of the wedding.
Ariel and Will Durant were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968 for Rousseau and Revolution, the tenth volume of The Story of Civilization. In 1977 they were presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Gerald Ford and Ariel was nominated as "Woman of the Year" by the city of Los Angeles. The Durants' autobiography A Dual Autobiography was published in 1978. ISBN 0-671-23078-6
Ariel Durant and her husband are buried in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
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Barbara W. Tuchman
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (/ˈtʌkmən/; January 30, 1912 – February 6, 1989) was an American historian and author. She became widely known first for The Guns of August (later August 1914), a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963.
Tuchman focused on writing popular history. Her clear, dramatic storytelling covered topics as diverse as the 14th century and World War I, and sold millions of copies.
Tuchman was the daughter of the banker Maurice Wertheim. She was a first cousin of New York district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, a niece of Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and granddaughter of Henry Morgenthau Sr., Woodrow Wilson's Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Radcliffe College in 1933.
She married Lester R. Tuchman, an internist, medical researcher and professor of clinical medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in 1939; they had three daughters (one of whom is Jessica Mathews).
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Carl Van Vechten
Carl Van Vechten (June 17, 1880 – December 21, 1964) was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.
Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he graduated from Washington High School in 1898, and later the University of Chicago in 1903. In 1906, he moved to New York City. He was hired as the assistant music critic at the New York Times. His interest in opera had him take a leave of absence from the paper in 1907, to travel to Europe to explore opera. While in England he married his long time friend from Cedar Rapids, Anna Snyder. He returned to his job at the New York Times in 1909 and then became the first American critic of modern dance. At that time, Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, and Loie Fuller were performing in New York City. The marriage to Anna Snyder ended in divorce in 1912 and he wed actress Fania Marinoff in 1914.
Several books of Van Vechten's essays on various subjects such as music and literature were published between 1915 and 1920. Between 1922 and 1930 Knopf published seven novels by Van Vechten, starting with Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works and ending with Parties.
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Carol Shields
Carol Ann Shields, CC, OM, FRSC, MA (née Warner) (June 2, 1935 – July 16, 2003) was an American-born Canadian author. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada.
Shields was born in Oak Park, Illinois. She studied at Hanover College Indiana, where she became member of the Alpha Delta Pi sorority. A United Nations scholarship encouraged Shields to spend a junior year abroad 1955–1956 at the University of Exeter in England. Later, Shields did post-graduate work at the University of Ottawa, where she received an MA in 1975.
In 1955, while on British Council sponsored study week in Scotland, she met a Canadian engineering student, Donald Hugh Shields. The couple married in 1957 and moved to Canada, where they had a son and four daughters. Shields later became a Canadian citizen.
In 1973, Shields became editorial assistant for the journal Canadian Slavonic Papers while living in Ottawa 1968–1978. In 1977, Shields was a sessional lecturer in the English Department at the University of Ottawa for a year. She later taught Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia while living in Vancouver 1978–80. In 1980, she and Don settled in Winnipeg, Manitoba, after Don was hired to teach in the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Engineering. Winnipeg was where she wrote her major books. From the fall of 1982 onward, Carol Shields taught in the English Department at the University of Manitoba, first as an Assistant Professor (1982–1992), then as an Associate Professor (1992–1995). Shields was made Full Professor of English in 1995, and, on retirement in 2000, she became Professor Emerita at the University of Manitoba.. In 1996, she became chancellor of the University of Winnipeg. In 2000, after Don's retirement, the couple moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where she died in 2003 of breast cancer at age 68.
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Carole Mallory
Carole Mallory is an American author, actress, former model, professor and critic who appeared in the films Looking for Mr. Goodbar and The Stepford Wives. She was a common law wife of writer Norman Mailer and kept notes and writings of this time, selling them to Harvard University in 2008 after the writer's death.
Carole Mallory was awarded an art scholarship from Springfield High School to Pennsylvania State University. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Art Education. She began work toward a Master's Degree at Temple's Tyler School of Art, and found a temporary teaching position in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania. She taught art in her home town of Springfield, Pennsylvania.
Mallory became a Pan Am airline stewardess and began modeling in Paris while still employed by the airline. Her first assignment was for French Vogue. Subsequently she appeared on the covers of a variety of magazines, such as Newsweek, Cosmopolitan, New York.
Mallory filmed over fifty commercials.[citation needed] Her first spot was for Olympic Airlines, the award winning ‘no dancing in the aisles’ campaign, while on leave of absence from Pan American Airlines. Mallory starred as Madge in the play Picnic, and as Tiffany in Mary, Mary at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania.[citation needed] Mallory studied acting with Wyn Handman, the director of American Place Theatre in New York. When she moved to Hollywood, she studied with Harvey Lembeck in his Comedy Improvisation Workshop.[citation needed]
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Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens ( /ˈtʃɑrlz ˈdɪkɪnz/; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic who is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period and the creator of some of the world's most memorable fictional characters. During his lifetime Dickens' works enjoyed unprecedented popularity and fame, but it was in the twentieth century that his literary genius was fully recognized by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to enjoy an enduring popularity among the general reading public.
Born in Portsmouth, England, Dickens left school to work in a factory after his father was thrown into debtors' prison. Though he had little formal education, his early impoverishment drove him to succeed. He edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels and hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.
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David Brion Davis
David Brion Davis (born February 16, 1927) is an American historian and authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He is the Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, and founder and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is a foremost intellectual and cultural historian. The author and editor of sixteen books, and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Davis has played a principal role in explaining the latest historiography to a broad audience. His books emphasize religious and ideological links among material conditions, political interests, and new political values. Ideology, in his view, is not a deliberate distortion of reality or a façade for material interests; rather, it is the conceptual lens through which groups of people perceive the world around them.
Davis taught at Yale from 1970 to 2001, after serving on the Cornell University faculty for 14 years. He has held one-year appointments as the Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and as the first French-American Foundation Chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
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Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an award-winning American author, playwright, and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. He currently lives near New York City in the suburb of Bronxville.
DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936 and grew up in a working-class Italian Catholic family in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City, not far from Arthur Avenue. Reflecting on his childhood in The Bronx, DeLillo later described how he was "...always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English."
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Donald Harrington
Donald Szantho Harrington (July 11, 1914 Newton, Middlesex County, Massachusetts - September 16, 2005 Romania) was an American politician and religious leader.
Harrington graduated from the University of Chicago in 1939, and began preaching at the People's Liberal Church on Chicago's South Side. The same year, he married fellow seminary student Vilma Szantho (d. 1982). They had two children: Loni Hancock and David Harrington.
Harrington became a minister of the Community Church of the New York Unitarian Universalist in New York City in 1944. He retired as senior minister in 1982.
He was State Chairman of the Liberal Party of New York, being the "face" of the party which was ruled with an iron fist by Alex Rose until 1976.
In the New York state election, 1966, Harrington ran for Lieutenant Governor of New York on the Liberal ticket with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. They were defeated by the incumbent Republicans Nelson Rockefeller and Malcolm Wilson, but Harrington was elected a delegate to the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1967.
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E. L. Doctorow
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (born January 6, 1931, New York City) is an American author. He is published in over thirty languages.
Edgar Lawrence ("E.L.") Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent who named him after Edgar Allan Poe. He attended city public grade schools and the Bronx High School of Science where, surrounded by mathematically gifted children, he fled to the office of the school literary magazine, Dynamo. There, he published his first literary effort, The Beetle, which he describes as ”a tale of etymological self-defamation inspired by my reading of Kafka.”
Doctorow attended Kenyon College in Ohio, where he studied with the poet and New Critic John Crowe Ransom, acted in college theater productions, and majored in philosophy. After graduating with honors in 1952, he completed a year of graduate work in English drama at Columbia University before being drafted into the United States Army. He served as a corporal in the signal corps, in Germany 1954-55 during the Allied occupation.
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Edwin Way Teale
Edwin Way Teale (June 2, 1899 – October 18, 1980) was an American naturalist, photographer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Teale's works serve as primary source material documenting environmental conditions across North America from 1930 - 1980. He is perhaps best known for his series The American Seasons, four books documenting over 75,000 miles (121,000 km) of automobile travel across North America following the changing seasons.
Born Edwin Alfred Teale in Joliet, Illinois to Oliver Cromwell and Clara Louise (Way) Teale, his interest in the natural world was fostered by childhood summers spent at his grandparents' "Lone Oak" farm in Indiana's dune country—experiences recalled in his book Dune Boy (1943). At the age of nine he declared himself a naturalist and at twelve changed his name to Edwin Way Teale.
He received a B.A. from Earlham College in English literature in 1922, then took a job at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas. Teale taught at Friends from 1922–1924 and served as men's and women's debate coach, yearbook adviser, and chairman of the campus Peace Contest. In 1923 he married Nellie Imogene Donovan, also on the Friends faculty, whom he had met while at Earlham College. In Wichita, Teale lived first at 421 South Vine Avenue in 1923, then moved to 621 South Vine Avenue with his wife Nellie in 1924.
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Elmo Henderson
Elmo Henderson (born 1935) is an African-American former boxer from Texas. Despite his 1972 win against Muhammad Ali in an exhibition match in San Antonio, Texas, he did not become particularly well known in the boxing community; John Spong of the Texas Monthly said that the match was the "shot not heard round the world". After the match, Henderson became a part of George Foreman's Rumble in the Jungle event in Zaire and won a libel suit against Norman Mailer and Playboy. As of 2003 Henderson was a homeless man in Austin, Texas.
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Erik Erikson
Erik Erikson (15 June 1902 – 12 May 1994) was a German-born American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on psychosocial development of human beings. He may be most famous for coining the phrase identity crisis. His son, Kai T. Erikson, is a noted American sociologist.
Although Erikson lacked even a bachelor's degree, he served as a professor of prominent institutions such as Harvard and Yale.
Born in Frankfurt, Erik Erikson's lifelong interest in the psychology of identity may be traced to his childhood. He was born on June 15, 1902. The circumstances of his birth were concealed from him in his childhood. His Danish-born mother, Karla Abrahamsen, came from a prominent Jewish family in Copenhagen. At the time of her son's birth in Germany, Karla Abrahamsen had not seen her husband, Jewish stockbroker Waldemar Isidor Salomonsen, for several years. Nonetheless, the boy was registered as Erik Salomonsen. There is no more information about his biological father, except that he was a Dane and his given name probably was Erik. It is also suggested that he was married at the time that Erikson was conceived.[citation needed] Following her son's birth, Karla trained to be a nurse, moved to Karlsruhe and in 1905, married a Jewish pediatrician, Theodor Homburger. In 1908, Erik Salomonsen became Erik Homburger and in 1911 he was officially adopted by his stepfather.
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Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker (September 27, 1924 - March 6, 1974) was a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.
Becker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrant parents. After completing military service, in which he served in the infantry and helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, he attended Syracuse University in New York. Upon graduation he joined the US Embassy in Paris as an administrative officer. In his early 30s, he returned to Syracuse University to pursue graduate studies in cultural anthropology. He completed his Ph.D. in 1960. The first of his nine books, Zen: A Rational Critique (1961) was based on his doctoral dissertation. After Syracuse, he became a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
After graduating from Syracuse University in 1960, Becker began his career as a teaching professor and writer. Becker taught at Syracuse University for a few years before eventually being fired in 1963 for siding with his mentor Dr. Thomas Szasz in the psychotherapy disputes. In 1965, Becker acquired a position at the University of California, Berkeley in the anthropology program. However, trouble again arose between him and the administration, leading to his departure from the university. At the time, thousands of students petitioned to keep Becker at the school and offered to pay his salary, but the petition did not succeed in retaining Becker. In 1967, he taught at San Francisco State’s Department of Psychology until January 1969 when he resigned in protest against the administration’s stringent policies against the student demonstrations.
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Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of these are considered classics of American literature.
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school he reported for a few months for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to enlist with the World War I ambulance drivers. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1922, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent, and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s "Lost Generation" expatriate community. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's first novel, was published in 1926.
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Gary Gilmore
Gary Mark Gilmore (December 4, 1940 – January 17, 1977) was an American who gained international notoriety for demanding that his own death sentence be fulfilled following two murders he committed in Utah. He became the first person executed in the United States after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in the 1976 decision Gregg v. Georgia. (These new statutes avoided the problems that had led earlier death penalty statutes to be deemed unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia.) Gilmore was executed by firing squad in 1977.
Gilmore was born in a hospital in McCamey, Texas on December 4, 1940, the second son of Frank and Bessie Gilmore. Frank Gilmore Sr. was an alcoholic con man who sold fake magazine subscriptions. He had married Bessie, a Mormon outcast from Provo, Utah, on a whim, in Sacramento, California. Frank had many wives and families before her, none of whom he cared about or supported. They had a son, Frank Jr., and then Gary came along while they were wandering aimlessly through Texas under the pseudonym of Coffman to avoid the law. Frank christened him Faye Robert Coffman, which Bessie quickly changed to Gary, once they left Texas. However, this birth certificate proved to be a sore spot years later (Gilmore's mother had kept his original birth certificate). Many years later, in the early 1960s, upon finding the birth certificate that stated his name was "Faye Robert Coffman", Gilmore thought that he had been illegitimate or someone else's son, felt that it was the reason he and his father did not ever get along, and he was very upset and walked out on his mother, Bessie, when she tried to explain to him.
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George Eliot
Mary Anne (alternatively Mary Ann or Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and well known for their realism and psychological insight.
She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years.
Her 1872 work, Middlemarch, has been described as the greatest novel in the English language by Martin Amis and by Julian Barnes.
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Gloria Steinem
Gloria Marie Steinem (born March 25, 1934) is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. A prominent writer and political figure, Steinem has founded many organizations and projects and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. She was a columnist for New York magazine and co-founded Ms. magazine. In 1969, she published an article, "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" which, along with her early support of abortion rights, catapulted her to national fame as a feminist leader. In 2005, Steinem worked alongside Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan to co-found the Women's Media Center, an organization that works to amplify the voices of women in the media through advocacy, media and leadership training, and the creation of original content. Steinem currently serves on the board of the organization. She continues to involve herself in politics and media affairs as a commentator, writer, lecturer, and organizer, campaigning for candidates and reforms and publishing books and articles.
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Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal ( /ˌɡɔr vɨˈdɑːl/; born October 3, 1925) is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality. He also ran for political office twice and has been a longtime political critic.
Vidal was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal in West Point, New York, the only child of 1st Lieutenant Eugene Luther Vidal (1895–1969) and Nina Gore (1903–1978). He was born in the Cadet Hospital of the United States Military Academy, where his father was the first aeronautics instructor, and was christened by the headmaster of St. Albans preparatory school, his future alma mater. According to "West Point and the Third Loyalty", an article Vidal wrote for The New York Review of Books (October 18, 1973), he later decided to be called Gore in honor of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Gore, Democratic senator from Oklahoma.
Vidal's father, a West Point football quarterback and captain, and an all-American basketball player, was director of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce (1933–1937) in the Roosevelt administration, was one of the first Army Air Corps pilots and, according to biographer Susan Butler, was the great love of Amelia Earhart's life. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was a co-founder of three American airlines: the Ludington Line, which merged with others and became Eastern Airlines, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT, which became TWA), and Northeast Airlines, which he founded with Earhart, as well as the Boston and Maine Railroad. The elder Vidal was also an athlete in the 1920 and 1924 Summer Olympics (seventh in the decathlon; U.S. pentathlon team coach).
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GWAR
GWAR is a satirical heavy metal/punkrock band formed in Richmond, Virginia, United States, in 1984. The band is well known for its elaborate science fiction/horror film inspired costumes, obscene lyrics and graphic stage performances, which feature humorous enactments of politically and morally taboo themes.
The band's characteristic costumes are generally made of foam latex, styrofoam, and hardened rubber. The costumes cover very little, with the rest of their bodies accentuated with makeup. They further their production in concert by spraying their audiences with mostly "harmless" fluids.
Another trademark of Gwar's live show is their lampooning of celebrities and figures in current events. Targets have included O. J. Simpson, Marilyn Manson, John Kerry, Mike Tyson, every American President since Ronald Reagan, Jerry Garcia, Osama Bin Laden, Michael Jackson, Al Gore, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Paris Hilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Lady Gaga, Jerry Springer, Mr. Lordi, Sarah Palin, Snooki and many others. The band also makes frequent references to political and historical figures, fantasy literature, and mythology. For instance, the song "Whargoul" makes reference to Minas Morgul as well as the eternal warrior of Michael Moorcock. Gwar also has many references to H. P. Lovecraft themes (Antarctica, Yig, Giant Penguins, Fleshy Insanities, etc.). They were nominated for two Grammys, one for Best Metal Performance "S.F.W." and one for Best Long Form Music Video "Phallus in Wonderland". The band also performed fire dancing until the character "Slymenstra Hymen" left the band.
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Henry James
Henry James, OM ((1843-04-15)15 April 1843 – 28 February 1916(1916-02-28)) was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
James alternated between America and Europe for the first 20 years of his life, after which he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is primarily known for the series of novels in which he portrays the encounter of Americans with Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting.
James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly, interesting. The concept of a good or bad novel is judged solely upon whether the author is good or bad. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime with moderate success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales.
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Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American writer and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.
Miller was born to tailor Heinrich Miller and Louise Marie Neiting, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, New York City, of German parents. As a child he lived at 662 Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, known in that time (and referred to frequently in his works) as the Fourteenth Ward. As a young man, he was active with the Socialist Party (his "quondam idol" was the Black Socialist Hubert Harrison).[citation needed] He briefly—for only one semester—attended the City College of New York. Although he was an exceptional student,[citation needed] he was willing neither to be anchored nor to submit to the traditional college system of education.
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Howard Mumford Jones
For the Louisiana state senator, see Howard M. Jones (Louisiana politician).
Howard Mumford Jones (April 16, 1892 - May 11, 1980) was a U.S. writer, literary critic, and professor of English at Harvard University.
Jones was the book editor for The Boston Evening Transcript.
Howard Jones was born in Saginaw, Michigan. Before going to Harvard, Jones was a member of the English faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In 1925, while there, he approached the president of the university, Harry Woodburn Chase, lamenting the absence of a bookstore in the town of Chapel Hill, and offered to open one in his office. This eventually became the Bull's Head Bookshop, now located in Student Stores.
In February, 1954 Mr. Jones gave the dedicatory address at the opening of the addition to the University of Wisconsin Library, entitled: "Books and the Independent Mind." The Crux of his comments was perhaps contained in his midpoint comment: "While it is true that we in this nation remain free to be idiotic, it does not necessarily follow, that we must be idiotic, in order to be free!"[citation needed] In 1965 he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for O Strange New World: American Culture-The Formative Years. He also authored Belief and Disbelief in American Literature (1967) and The Age of Energy (1971), and many scholarly journal articles.
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Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary (1998), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 (1973), The Curse of Lono (1983), and Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966).
He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. He is known also for his lifelong use of alcohol, LSD, mescaline, and cocaine (among other substances); his love of firearms; his inveterate hatred of Richard Nixon; and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism. While suffering a bout of health problems, he committed suicide in 2005 at the age of 67.
Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the first of three sons, to Jack Robert Thompson (September 4, 1893, Horse Cave, Kentucky – July 3, 1952, Louisville), a public insurance adjuster and World War I veteran, and Virginia Ray Davison (1908, Springfield, Kentucky – March 20, 1998, Louisville), a librarian. His parents were introduced to each other by a friend from Jack's fraternity at the University of Kentucky in September 1934, and were married on November 2, 1935.
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Isabella Rossellini
Isabella Fiorella Elettra Giovanna Rossellini (born 18 June 1952) is an Italian actress, filmmaker, author, philanthropist, and model. Rossellini is noted for her 14-year tenure as a Lancôme model, and for her roles in films such as Blue Velvet and Death Becomes Her.
Rossellini is a daughter of Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and Italian director Roberto Rossellini. She has three siblings from her mother: her twin sister Isotta Ingrid Rossellini, who is an adjunct professor of Italian literature; a brother, Robertino Ingmar Rossellini; and a half-sister, Pia Lindström, who formerly worked on television and is from her mother's first marriage with Petter Lindström. She has four other siblings from her father's two other marriages: Romano (died at age 9), Renzo, Gil, and Raffaella.
Rossellini was born in Rome, and raised there, as well as in Santa Marinella and Paris. She underwent an operation for appendicitis at the age of five. At 13, she was diagnosed with scoliosis.[citation needed] In order to correct it, she had to undergo an 18 month ordeal of painful stretchings, body casts, surgery on her spine using pieces of one of her shin bones (used to add supports for the individual vertebrae without risking foreign body rejection issues), and a recovery from that surgery.[citation needed] Consequently, she has permanent incision scars on her back and shin.
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James Alan McPherson
James Alan McPherson (born September 16, 1943) is an American short story writer and essayist. He has been a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. McPherson is a member of the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
McPherson was born in Savannah, Georgia. He attended Morris Brown College in Atlanta, graduating in 1965. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1968. He has also been educated at Morgan State University, The University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and Yale Law School.[citation needed]
McPherson won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his short story collection Elbow Room, becoming the first African-American to win the Pulitzer for fiction. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981. His work has appeared in 27 journals and magazines, seven short-story anthologies, and The Best American Essays.[citation needed] In 1995 McPherson was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[citation needed]
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Jane Smiley
Jane Smiley (born September 26, 1949) is an American novelist.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained an A.B. at Vassar College, then earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar.
Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script, produced for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists. Her essay "Feminism Meets the Free Market" was included in the 2006 anthology Mommy Wars by Washington Post writer Leslie Morgan Steiner.
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Janet Flanner
Janet Flanner (March 13, 1892 – November 7, 1978) was an American writer and journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975. She wrote under the pen name "Genêt". She also published a single novel, The Cubical City, set in New York City.
Janet Flanner was born in Indianapolis, Indiana to Frank and Mary Flanner. She had two sisters, Marie and Hildegarde Flanner. Her father co-owned a mortuary and ran the first crematorium in the state of Indiana. After a period spent traveling abroad with her family and studies at Tudor Hall School for Girls (now Park Tudor School), she enrolled in the University of Chicago in 1912, leaving the university in 1914. Two years later, she returned to her native city to take up a post as the first cinema critic on the local paper, the Indianapolis Star.
In 1918 she married William "Lane" Rehm, a friend that she had made while at the University of Chicago. He was an artist in New York City, and she later admitted that she married him to get out of Indianapolis. The marriage lasted for only a few years and they divorced amicably in 1926. Rehm was supportive of Flanner's career until his death.
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Jean Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (/ˈsɑːtrə/; French pronunciation: [saʁtʁ]; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism, and one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy and Marxism. His work, in addition to being influential to existentialism and Marxism, has also influenced sociology, critical theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines. Sartre has also been noted for his relationship with the prominent feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir.
He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused it, saying that he always declined official honours and that, "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His mother was of Alsatian origin and the first cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer. (Her father, Charles Schweitzer, was the older brother of Albert Schweitzer's father, Louis Théophile.) When Sartre was only a year old, his father died of a fever. Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' house in Meudon, where she raised Sartre with help from her father, a professor of German, who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age. When he was twelve, Satre's mother remarried, and the family moved to La Rochelle, where he was frequently bullied.
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Jeanne Campbell
Lady Jeanne Louise Campbell (10 December 1928 – 9 June 2007) was a British socialite and foreign correspondent who wrote for the Evening Standard in the 1950s and 1960s.
Lady Jeanne was the daughter of Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll and his first wife, the Hon. Janet Gladys Aitken. She was a granddaughter of the press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who was the owner of the Evening Standard, and a stepdaughter of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, as well as the great-niece of Queen Victoria's daughter Louise
Lady Jeanne married in 1962, as her first husband, the American writer Norman Mailer (he described her as "interesting, complex, and Machiavellian"). They divorced in Mexico a year later.
She married, in 1967, as her second husband, John Sergeant Cram III, a descendant of the railroad tycoon Jay Gould. They divorced in 1968.
She had two children. Her elder daughter, Kate Mailer (born 1962), is an actress. Her younger daughter, Cusi Cram (born 1967), is also an actress (she portrayed Cassie Callison on the soap opera One Life to Live from 1981 until 1983), a Herrick-prize-winning playwright, and an Emmy-nominated writer for the children's animated television program Arthur.
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Jim Morrison
James Douglas "Jim" Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971) was the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors, as well as a poet. Following The Doors' explosive rise to fame in 1967, Morrison developed a severe alcohol and drug dependency that culminated in his death at the age of 27 in Paris. He is presumed to have died from a heroin overdose, but as no autopsy was performed, the events surrounding his death and the exact cause of it continue to be disputed by many to this day.
Morrison was well known for often improvising spoken word poetry passages while the band played live. Due to his wild personality and performances, he is regarded by critics and fans as one of the most iconic, charismatic and pioneering frontmen in rock music history. Morrison was ranked number 47 on Rolling Stone's list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time", and number 22 on Classic Rock Magazine's "50 Greatest Singers In Rock".
James Douglas Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida, to future Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison and Clara Morrison. Morrison had a sister, Anne Robin, who was born in 1947 in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and a brother, Andrew Lee Morrison, who was born in 1948 in Los Altos, California. He was of Irish and Scottish descent.
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Joan Didion
Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.
Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, to parents Frank Reese and Eduene (née Jerrett) Didion. Didion recalls writing things down as early as age five, though she claims that she never saw herself as a writer until after being published. She read everything she could get her hands on after learning how to read and even needed written permission from her mother to borrow adult books, biographies especially, from the library at a young age. With this, she identified herself as being a "shy, bookish child", who pushed herself to overcome these personal obstacles through acting and public speaking.
As a child, Didion attended kindergarten and first grade. Because her father was in the Army Air Corps during World War II, her family was constantly relocated and she did not attend school on a regular basis. Then, at the age of nine or ten,[Which one?] in 1943 or early 1944, her family settled back in Sacramento, and her father went to Detroit to settle defense contracts for World War I and II. Didion wrote, in her 2003 memoir Where I Was From, that moving as often as her family did made her feel like a perpetual outsider.
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John Buffalo Mailer
John Buffalo Mailer (born April 16, 1978) is an American author, playwright, actor, producer, and journalist.
Mailer was born in Brooklyn, the youngest child of novelist Norman Mailer and author Norris Church Mailer. Mailer is a graduate of Wesleyan University. He has written several screenplays and is a freelance journalist. In 2006 he co-wrote The Big Empty (Nation Books, February ‘06) with his father.
Mailer founded Back House Productions in New York City with three other Wesleyan grads in October 2000. The following year, Back House became the resident theater company of The Drama Bookshop’s Arthur Seelan Theater, and developed, among many plays, the 2008 Tony winner for Best Musical, In The Heights. On being involved in theatre, John says: "I think theater will always be a powerful force because we need that human touch, particularly as we spend more and more time with machines, cell phones, computers we start to lose our humanity." In 2001, John’s first play, Hello Herman, had its New York Premiere at the Grove Street Playhouse and nine years later, its West Coast Premiere at the Edgemar Center for the Arts in Los Angeles with John in the lead role. The result was Dramatists Play Services publishing the play in the Spring of 2010. John’s second play, Crazy Eyes, premiered in Athens, Greece in 2005.
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John Cheever
John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is "now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century." While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including "The Enormous Radio," "Goodbye, My Brother," "The Five-Forty-Eight," "The Country Husband," and "The Swimmer"), he also wrote a number of novels, such as The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958),The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer (1977).
His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both – light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.
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John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos (/dɵsˈpæsɵs/; January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist and artist.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, John Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos (1844–1917), a distinguished lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Dos Passos was married with a son several years older than John. John's father married his mother after his wife died in 1910, although he refused to acknowledge his second son for another two years, until John was 16. John Randolph Dos Passos was an authority on trusts, a staunch supporter of the powerful industrial conglomerates that his son would come to oppose in his fictional works of the 1920s and 1930s.
The younger Dos Passos received a first-class education, enrolling at The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut in 1907 under the name John Roderigo Madison, then traveling with a private tutor on a six-month tour of France, England, Italy, Greece, and the Middle East to study the masters of classical art, architecture, and literature.
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John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
pronunciation (help·info) (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963.
After military service as commander of the Motor Torpedo Boats PT-109 and PT-59 during World War II in the South Pacific, Kennedy represented Massachusetts's 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 as a Democrat. Thereafter, he served in the U.S. Senate from 1953 until 1960. Kennedy defeated then Vice President and Republican candidate Richard Nixon in the 1960 U.S. presidential election. He was the youngest elected to the office, at the age of 43, the second-youngest President (after Theodore Roosevelt), and the first person born in the 20th century to serve as president. Kennedy is the only Catholic president, and is the only president to have won a Pulitzer Prize. Events during his presidency included the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Space Race, the African American Civil Rights Movement, and early stages of the Vietnam War.
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John Kennedy Toole
John Kennedy Toole (December 17, 1937 – March 26, 1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, best-known for his posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces. He also wrote The Neon Bible. Although several people in the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy, Toole's novels were rejected during his lifetime. After suffering from paranoia and depression due in part to these failures, he committed suicide at the age of 31.
Toole was born to a middle class family in New Orleans. From a young age, his mother taught him an appreciation of culture. She was thoroughly involved in his affairs for most of his life, and at times they had a difficult relationship. With his mother's encouragement, Toole became a stage performer at the age of 10 doing comic impressions and acting. At 16 he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, which he later dismissed as "adolescent".
Toole received an academic scholarship to Tulane University. After graduating from Tulane, he studied English at Columbia University in New York while teaching simultaneously at Hunter College. He also taught at various Louisiana colleges, and during his early career as an academic he was valued on the faculty party circuit for his wit and gift for mimicry. His studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the army, where he taught English to Spanish-speaking recruits in San Juan, Puerto Rico. After receiving a promotion, he used his private office to begin writing A Confederacy of Dunces, which he finished at his parents' home after his discharge.
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John Toland (author)
John Willard Toland (June 29, 1912 - January 4, 2004) was an American author and historian. He is best known for his bestselling biography of Adolf Hitler and for his Pulitzer Prize-winning World War II history of Japan, The Rising Sun.
Toland was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He was a graduate of Williams College, and he also attended the Yale School of Drama for a time. His original goal was to become a playwright. In the summers between his college years, he travelled with hobos and wrote several plays with hobos as central characters, none of which achieved the stage. In 1961, Toland said that in his early years as a writer he had been "about as big a failure as a man can be". He claimed to have written six complete novels, 26 plays, and a hundred short stories before successfully completing his first sale, a short story he sold to The American Magazine in 1954 for $165. At one point he managed to publish an article on dirigibles in Look magazine; it proved extremely popular and led to his career as a historian. Dirigibles were also the subject of his first full published book, entitled Ships in the Sky and published in 1957.
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John Updike
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.
Updike's most famous work is his Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and the novella "Rabbit Remembered"), which chronicles Rabbit's life over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to his death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit At Rest (1990) received the Pulitzer Prize. Updike is one of only three authors (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.
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John Wilcock
John Wilcock (b. Aug 4, 1927, in Sheffield, England) is a British journalist known for his work in the underground press, as well as his travel guide books.
One of the five co-founders of the New York Village Voice, Wilcock shook up staid publishing in the USA. His influences extended to several continents, including Australia and the United Kingdom, where — in his mild-mannered way — he pushed the boundaries of image and speech. The counterculture was nothing but a dull puddle until Wilcock kicked out the jams and ignited the underground press, which attracted absurd prosecutions that of course boosted circulations. An unsung hero of the sixties, Wilcock also served three years as a travel editor at The New York Times.
Wilcock had began working for newspapers in his home country, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, as well as magazines in Toronto, Canada.
After co-founding the Village Voice in 1955, his Voice weekly column lasted from 1955 to 1965, when he left to edit New York's first underground paper, the East Village Other.
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Kate Mailer
Kate Mailer (born in New York City, New York, 1962) is an American stage and film actress who is the daughter of American author-playwright Norman Mailer and third wife journalist, Lady Jeanne Campbell, eldest daughter of the 11th Duke of Argyll. Her work includes roles on stage in the Anton Chekhov play The Cherry Orchard, and on film in Jean-Luc Godard's adaptation of the William Shakespeare play King Lear with Burgess Meredith (1987) and in W. T. Morgan's A Matter of Degrees with Arye Gross (1990).
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Larry McMurtry
Larry Jeff McMurtry (born June 3, 1936) is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas. He is known for his 1975 novel Terms of Endearment, his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, a historical saga that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive their cattle from the Rio Grande to a new home in the frontier of Montana, and for co-writing the adapted screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. Lonesome Dove was adapted into a television miniseries and both the films of Terms of Endearment and Brokeback Mountain won Academy Awards. He also awarded Brian Allen Carr the inaugural Texas Observer Story Prize.
McMurtry was born in Archer City, 25 miles from Wichita Falls, Texas, the son of Hazel Ruth (née McIver) and William Jefferson McMurtry, who was a rancher. He grew up on a ranch outside Archer City, Texas, which is the model for the town of Thalia that appears in much of his fiction. He earned degrees from University of North Texas (B.A. 1958) and Rice University (M.A. 1960).
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Lee Harvey Oswald
Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963) was, according to four government investigations, the sniper who assassinated John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
A former U.S. Marine who had briefly (October 1959 – June 1962) defected to the Soviet Union, Oswald was initially arrested for the murder of police officer J. D. Tippit, on a Dallas street approximately 40 minutes after Kennedy was shot. Suspected in the assassination of Kennedy as well, Oswald denied involvement in either of the killings. Two days later, while being transferred from police headquarters to the county jail, Oswald was shot and killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby in full view of television cameras broadcasting live.
In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy, firing three shots, a conclusion also reached by prior investigations carried out by the FBI and Dallas Police Department. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Oswald fired the shots which killed Kennedy, but differed from previous investigations in concluding he 'probably' did not act alone. The evidence used to form this conclusion has since been disputed.
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Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й, pronounced [lʲev nʲɪkɐˈlaɪvʲɪtɕ tɐlˈstoj] (
listen); known in the Anglosphere as Leo Tolstoy) (September 9, 1828 – November 20, 1910) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.
His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Lester Bangs
Leslie Conway "Lester" Bangs (December 13, 1948 – April 30, 1982) was an American music journalist, author, and musician. He wrote for Creem and Rolling Stone magazines and was known for his leading influence in rock music criticism.
Bangs was born in Escondido, California, the son of Norma Belle (née Clifton) and Conway Leslie Bangs, a truck driver. His parents were both from Texas, his father from Enlow and his mother from Pecos County. His mother was a devout Jehovah's Witness; his father died in a fire when Bangs was young. In 1969, Bangs began writing freelance after reading an ad in Rolling Stone soliciting readers' reviews. His first piece was a negative review of the MC5 album, Kick Out The Jams, which he sent to Rolling Stone with a note requesting that if the magazine were to pass on publishing the review, that he receive a reason for their decision; however, no reply was forthcoming as the magazine did indeed publish the review.
Bangs wrote about Janis Joplin's death by drug overdose, "It's not just that this kind of early death has become a fact of life that has become disturbing, but that it's been accepted as a given so quickly". In 1973, Jann Wenner fired Bangs from Rolling Stone, a negative review of Canned Heat being the final event. He moved to Detroit to edit and write for Creem. After leaving Creem, he wrote for The Village Voice, Penthouse, Playboy, New Musical Express, and many other publications.
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Lloyd Cole
Lloyd Cole (born 31 January 1961) is an English singer and songwriter, known for his role as lead singer of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions from 1984 to 1989, and for his subsequent solo work.
Cole was born in Buxton, Derbyshire. He grew up in nearby Chapel en le Frith and went to New Mills Grammar School and later attended Runshaw College in Leyland, Lancashire. After failing in Law at University College London, he later attended (but did not graduate from) the University of Glasgow, where he studied Philosophy and English and met the other members of The Commotions.
The Commotions' 1984 debut, Rattlesnakes, contained literary and pop culture references to such figures as Arthur Lee, Norman Mailer, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Simone de Beauvoir, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion. The group produced two more albums, Easy Pieces and Mainstream, before disbanding in 1989, when Cole relocated to New York to record with various artists, including Fred Maher, Robert Quine and Matthew Sweet.
This solo setting produced two acclaimed albums, Lloyd Cole in 1990 and 1991's Don't Get Weird on Me Babe. The latter was recorded in two parts: one side continued the New York rock mastered on his first solo album, while the other side featured a session orchestra, much in the style of Burt Bacharach or Scott Walker. Although some reviewers have claimed Don't Get Weird on Me Babe (the title being a quotation from the American minimalist writer Raymond Carver) to be a creative peak, it produced significantly fewer record sales. While he remained with Polydor as his record label, the US distribution contract with Capitol Records ended. (US rights were immediately picked up by Rykodisc).
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Lord Beaverbrook
William Maxwell "Max" Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, Bt, PC, ONB, (25 May 1879 – 9 June 1964) was an Anglo-Canadian business tycoon, politician, and writer.
Lord Beaverbrook held a tight grip on the British media as an influential Press Baron, owning The Daily Express newspaper, as well as the London Evening Standard and the Sunday Express. His political career included serving as a Minister in the British Government during both world wars.
He was an influential and often mentioned figure in British society of the first half of the 20th century.
Aitken was born in Maple, Ontario, Canada, (near Keele Street and Major Mackenzie Drive) in 1879, the son of a Scottish-born Presbyterian minister. The following year, his family moved to Newcastle, New Brunswick, Canada, which he considered to be his home town. It was here, at the age of 13, that he published his first newspaper.
Although Aitken wrote the entrance examinations for Dalhousie University and registered at the King's College Law School, he did not attend either institution. His only formal higher education came when he briefly attended the University of New Brunswick. Aitken worked for a short time as an office boy in the law office of Richard Bedford Bennett, in the town of Chatham, New Brunswick. Bennett later became Prime Minister of Canada and a business associate.
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Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.
Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris' then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.
Proust's father, Achille Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, responsible for studying and attempting to remedy the causes and movements of cholera through Europe and Asia; he was the author of many articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a rich and cultured Jewish family from Alsace. She was literate and well-read; her letters demonstrate a well-developed sense of humour, and her command of English was sufficient for her to provide the necessary assistance to her son's later attempts to translate John Ruskin. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith. He was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practiced that faith.
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Marilyn Monroe
Norma Jeane Mortensen Baker (June 1, 1926 – August 5, 1962), professionally recognized as Marilyn Monroe, was an American actress, model, and singer, who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s and early 1960s.
After spending much of her childhood in foster homes, Monroe began a career as a model, which led to a film contract in 1946 with Twentieth Century-Fox. Her early film appearances were minor, but her performances in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve (both 1950) drew attention to her. By 1953, Monroe had progressed to a leading role in Niagara (1953), a melodramatic film noir that dwelt on her seductiveness. Her "dumb blonde" persona was used to comic effect in subsequent films such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and The Seven Year Itch (1955). Limited by typecasting, Monroe studied at the Actors Studio to broaden her range. Her dramatic performance in Bus Stop (1956) was hailed by critics and garnered a Golden Globe nomination. Her production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, released The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), for which she received a BAFTA Award nomination and won a David di Donatello award. She received a Golden Globe Award for her performance in Some Like It Hot (1959). Monroe's last completed film was The Misfits, co-starring Clark Gable with screenplay by her then-husband, Arthur Miller.
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Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of several of Britain's best-known novels, including Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He was the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness." Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a "terrible compulsive vividness in his style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English," and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."
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Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney (born March 25, 1967) is an American artist who works in sculpture, photography, drawing and film. His early works were sculptural installations combined with performance and video. Between 1994 and 2002 he created the Cremaster Cycle, a series of five films described by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian as "one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema."
Matthew Barney was born March 25, 1967, in San Francisco, California. He lived in Boise, Idaho from 1973 to 1985, where he attended elementary, middle, and high school. His parents divorced and his mother moved to New York City, where he would frequently visit, and where he was introduced to the art scene. In 1989, he graduated from Yale University. His earliest works, created at Yale, were staged at the university’s athletic complex. In the 90s, Barney moved to New York, where he worked as a male model—more notably for J.Crew catalogues—a career that helped him finance his early work as an artist. Barney lives with his partner, singer Björk, with whom he had a daughter in 2002.
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Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952) is an American writer, best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999.
Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and grew up in Pasadena, California. He studied English literature at Stanford University where he earned his degree. Later, at the University of Iowa, he received a Michener Fellowship and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. While studying at Iowa, he had short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review. His short story, "White Angel", was later used as a chapter in his novel A Home at the End of the World. It was included in "The Best American Short Stories, 1989," published by Houghton Mifflin.
In 1993, Cunningham received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1998 a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 1995 he was awarded the Whiting Writers' Award. Cunningham has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and in the creative writing M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College. He is currently professor of creative writing at Yale University.
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Michael Mailer
Michael Mailer (born 1964) is a film producer and the oldest son of Beverly Bentley and writer Norman Mailer. He graduated from Harvard in 1987. He has produced over 20 films. He has five sisters and three brothers. He is the founder and president of Michael Mailer Films. He married Sasha Lazard in 2004 and they have one son Cyrus.
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Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.; January 17, 1942) is an American former professional boxer, philanthropist and social activist. Considered a cultural icon, Ali was both idolized and vilified.
Originally known as Cassius Clay, Ali changed his name after joining the Nation of Islam in 1964, subsequently converting to Sunni Islam in 1975, and more recently practicing Sufism.[clarification needed] In 1967, three years after Ali had won the World Heavyweight Championship, he was publicly vilified for his refusal to be conscripted into the U.S. military, based on his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. Ali stated, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong... No Viet Cong ever called me nigger" – one of the more telling remarks of the era.
Widespread protests against the Vietnam War had not yet begun, but with that one phrase, Ali articulated the reason to oppose the war for a generation of young Americans, and his words served as a touchstone for the racial and antiwar upheavals that would rock the 1960s. Ali's example inspired Martin Luther King Jr. – who had been reluctant to alienate the Johnson Administration and its support of the civil rights agenda – to voice his own opposition to the war for the first time.
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Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist, historian, and political theorist. He was a prominent exponent of the Austrian School of economics who helped to define libertarianism by theorising a form of free-market anarchism which he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the American libertarian movement.
Building on the Austrian School's concept of spontaneous order, support for a free market in money production and condemnation of central planning, Rothbard advocated abolition of coercive government control of society and the economy. He considered the monopoly force of government the greatest danger to liberty and the long-term well-being of the populace, labeling the state as nothing but a "gang of thieves writ large"—the locus of the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society.
Rothbard concluded that all services provided by monopoly governments could be provided more efficiently by the private sector. He viewed many regulations and laws ostensibly promulgated for the "public interest" as self-interested power grabs by scheming government bureaucrats engaging in dangerously unfettered self-aggrandizement, as they were not subject to market disciplines. Rothbard held that there were inefficiencies involved with government services and asserted that market disciplines would eliminate them, if the services could be provided by competition in the private sector.
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Noel Parmentel
Noel E. Parmentel, Jr., was a leading figure on the New York political journalism, literary, and cultural scene during the third quarter of the 20th Century.
Born in 1927 in Algiers (a part of greater New Orleans), Parmentel attended Tulane University after service in the Marine Corps, and migrated to New York in the 1950s. There he quickly became a prominent fixture in literary circles and in political journalism, "the tall, shambling New Orleans freelance pundit," known for his witty essays, usually targeting those he considered "phonies," be they of the left or the right. "Anyone who knew anything about New York then knew Noel," wrote Dan Wakefield in New York in the Fifties, describing Parmentel's making "a fine art of the ethnic insult," dining out on his "reputation for outrageousness," and savaging the right in The Nation, the left in National Review, and both in Esquire. He was "a respecter of no race or tradition or station," his style "that of an axe-murderer, albeit a funny one," in the words of his early protege John Gregory Dunne;William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote admiringly of Parmentel's "vituperative art." In the New York of the day, though "phonies" were proportionately distributed among the political classes, the left was more numerous than the right; Parmentel thus had the reputation in some circles of being an arch-conservative, which in fact he was not. (Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, credited Parmentel with introducing the much-quoted line about Richard Nixon, "Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?".) Those he respected as not "phonies" included such varied figures as the sociologist C. Wright Mills, the politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio, and Father James Harold Flye, mentor of James Agee.
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Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 - November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, John McPhee, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with John Wilcock, Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts and politics oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he received the lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
In 1992, Mailer received the annual Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award presented by the Tulsa Library Trust.
Norman Kingsley Mailer was born to a well-known Jewish family in Long Branch. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, was a South African-born accountant, and his mother, Fanny Schneider, ran a housekeeping and nursing agency. Mailer's sister, Barbara, was born in 1927. His second sister, Norma, was born in 1930. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, he graduated from Boys' High School and entered Harvard University in 1939, where he studied aeronautical engineering. At Harvard, he became interested in writing and published his first story at the age of 18, winning Story magazine's college contest in 1941. As an undergraduate, he was a member of The Signet Society. After graduating in 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. In World War II, he served in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry. He was not involved in much combat and completed his service as a cook, but the experience provided enough material for The Naked and the Dead.
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Norris Church Mailer
Norris Church Mailer (born Barbara Jean Davis January 31, 1949 in Atkins, Arkansas, – November 21, 2010 in Brooklyn Heights) was the widow of American novelist, Norman Mailer, and author of the memoir, A Ticket to the Circus, and of several novels.
Before her relationship with Mailer, she married Larry Norris, gave birth to son Matthew in 1972, and was divorced in 1975. After her divorce, she claimed to have "had a fling" with Bill Clinton.
After her divorce, she lived in Russellville, Arkansas, taught high-school art, and wrote about a hundred pages of a novel which she later reshaped into Windchill Summer, and published in 2000.
She had read Norman Mailer's biography of Marilyn Monroe and arranged in 1975 to attend a party in Russellville at which he was a guest. They went to her home after the party. After he left Arkansas, she mailed him a love poem, which he returned to her, marked up with his compositional criticism. Four months later, having left her job, she moved with his help to a brownstone row house apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and became a model with Wilhelmina Models. She adopted her former married name, Norris, as her first name and took Mailer's suggestion of Church as her surname.
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Oscar Hijuelos
Oscar Jerome Hijuelos (born August 24, 1951) is an American novelist. He is the first Hispanic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Hijuelos was born in New York City, in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, to Cuban immigrant parents, Pascual and Magdalena (Torrens) Hijuelos, both from Holguín, Cuba. As a young child, he suffered from acute nephritis after a vacation trip to Cuba with his mother and brother, and was in St. Luke's Convalescent Hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut for almost a year and eventually recovered.
He attended the Corpus Christi School in Morningside Heights, public schools, and later attended Bronx Community College, Lehman College, and Manhattan Community College before matriculating into and studying writing at the City College of New York (B.A., 1975; M.A. in Creative Writing, 1976) under Donald Barthelme, Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, Frederic Tuten, and others. Barthelme became his mentor and friend.
He then practiced various professions, including working for an advertising agency, Transportation Displays Inc. (TDI), before taking up writing full time.
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Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpaβlo piˈkaso], 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are commonly regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.
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Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In 1969 he became a major celebrity with the publication of the controversial Portnoy's Complaint, the humorous and sexually explicit psychoanalytical monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor", filled with "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language".
Roth has been one of the most honored authors of his generation: his books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, the subject of many other of Roth's novels. His 2001 novel The Human Stain, another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. His fiction, set frequently in Newark, New Jersey, is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "supple, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity.
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Ramona Koval
Ramona Koval (born 1954, Melbourne) is an Australian broadcaster, writer and journalist.
Her parents were Yiddish-speaking survivors of the Holocaust who arrived in Melbourne from Poland in 1950.
Koval is known for her extended and in-depth interviews with significant writers. She has had a long and varied career on air in Australia on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio. She was presenter of the Radio National Drive program and the morning presenter on Melbourne's 3LO (now 774 ABC Melbourne) through the late 1980s and early 1990s and became a fixture in the literary world after joining Radio National's Books and Writing in 1994. Ramona presented The Book Show, introduced by Radio National in 2006 to consolidate its various book programs. The Book Show was the world's only daily radio program devoted to the books, writing and publishing.
She left the ABC in October 2011 to pursue her own writing.
Koval has written several books, including a novel, Samovar, and a cookbook Jewish Cooking, Jewish Cooks. She has written for many newspapers and international journals, and her interviews have been published in book form. Her latest collection of Radio National interviews is Tasting Life Twice: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, published by ABC Books (2005).
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René Dubos
René Jules Dubos (February 20, 1901 – February 20, 1982) was a French-born American microbiologist, experimental pathologist, environmentalist, humanist, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book So Human An Animal. He is credited as an author of a maxim, "Think globally, act locally".
Dubos devoted most of his professional life to the empirical study of microbial diseases and to the analysis of the environmental and social factors that affect the welfare of humans. His pioneering research in isolating antibacterial substances from certain soil microorganisms led to the discovery of major antibiotics. He performed groundbreaking research and wrote extensively on a number of subjects, including tuberculosis, pneumonia, and the mechanisms of acquired immunity, natural susceptibility, and resistance to infection. Aside from a period from 1942 to 1944 when he was George Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology and professor of tropical medicine at the Schools of Medicine and Public Health at Harvard University, his scientific career was spent entirely at The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, later renamed The Rockefeller University.
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Richard Ford
Richard Ford (born February 16, 1944) is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, and the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories.
Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the only son of Parker Carrol Ford, a traveling salesman for Faultless Starch, a Kansas City company. When Ford was eight years old, his father had a major heart attack, and thereafter Ford spent as much time with his grandfather, a former prizefighter and hotel owner in Little Rock, Arkansas, as he did with his parents in Mississippi. Ford’s father died of a second heart attack in 1960.
Ford received a B.A. from Michigan State University. Having enrolled to study hotel management, he switched to English. After graduating he taught junior high school in Flint, Michigan, and enlisted in the US Marines but was discharged after contracting hepatitis. At university he met Kristina Hensley, his future wife; the two married in 1968.
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Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter (6 August 1916 – 24 October 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, became the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus", largely due to his emphasis on ideas and political culture rather than the day-to-day doings of politicians. His influence is ongoing, as modern critics profess admiration for the grace of his writing, and the depth of his insight.
His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimental analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history Anti-intellectualism in American Life.
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Rip Torn
Elmore Rual "Rip" Torn, Jr. (born February 6, 1931), is an American actor of stage, screen and television.
Torn received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his role in the 1983 film Cross Creek. His work includes the role of Artie, the producer, on The Larry Sanders Show, for which he was nominated for six Emmy Awards, winning in 1996. Torn also won an American Comedy Award for Funniest Supporting Male in a Series, and two CableACE Awards for his work on the show, and was nominated for a Satellite Award in 1997 as well.
Torn was born Elmore Rual Torn, Jr. in Temple, Texas, the son of Thelma Mary (née Spacek) and Elmore Rual Torn, an agriculturalist and economist. Being given the name "Rip" is a family tradition of men in the Torn family for several generations. It was given to him by his father, who was also called Rip; although as a young child and teenager he was referred to as "Skippy". He was a member of the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets and is a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity.
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Robert F. Williams
Robert Franklin Williams (February 26, 1925 – October 15, 1996) was a civil rights leader, the president of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP chapter in the 1950s and early 1960s, and author. At a time when racial tension was high and official abuses were rampant, Williams was a key figure in promoting both integration[citation needed] and armed black self-defense in the United States. He and his wife left the United States in 1961 to avoid prosecution for kidnapping. A self-professed Black Nationalist and supporter of liberation, he lived in both Cuba and communist China in exile. He was a fugitive from justice for many years after he was falsely accused of kidnapping (The charges were later dropped).
Williams' book Negroes with Guns (1962), published while he was in exile in Cuba, details his experience with violent racism and his disagreement with the pacifist Civil Rights Movement philosophies. Among others the book influenced Huey Newton, who founded the Black Panthers.
Williams was born in Monroe, North Carolina in 1925 to Emma C. and John L. Williams, a railroad boiler washer. His grandmother, a former slave, gave Williams the rifle with which his grandfather, a Republican campaigner and publisher of the newspaper The People's Voice, had defended himself in the hard years after Reconstruction. At the age of 11, Williams witnessed the beating and dragging of a black woman by the police officer Jesse Helms, Sr. (He was the father of future US Senator Jesse Helms.)
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Robert Olen Butler
Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois, to Robert Olen Butler Sr., an actor and theater professor who became the chairman of the theater department of Saint Louis University, and his wife, the former Lucille Frances Hall, an executive secretary.
Butler attended Northwestern University as a theater major (B.S., 1967) and switched to playwriting at the University of Iowa (M.A., 1969).
Butler served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1971, first as a counter-intelligence special agent for the Army and later as a translator. He rose to the rank of sergeant in the Army Military Intelligence Corps. His experiences during that period have informed his writings, and as a result, in 1987 Butler received the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award from the Vietnam Veterans of America for outstanding contributions to American culture by a veteran. "My greatest pleasure in life was at 2 in the morning to wander out into the steamy back alleys of Saigon, where nobody ever seemed to sleep, and just walk the alleys and crouch in the doorways with the people," Butler told The New York Times in 1993. "The Vietnamese were the warmest, most open and welcoming people I've ever met, and they just invited me into their homes and into their culture and into their lives."
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Robert Taber
Robert Schell Taber (1865 – 8 March 1904) was an American Broadway actor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Born in 1865 in Staten Island in New York, where his father, Charles Corey Taber (1821–1892) was a well-known cotton merchant, his brothers were mathematician Dr. Henry S. Taber (1860–1936), a member of the American Academy and professor of mathematics at Clark University from 1888 to 1921, and Edward Martin Taber (1863–1896), a landscape artist. Robert Taber attended Princeton University.
His first professional engagement was in 1886 as Silvius in As You Like It with the theatrical company of Helena Modjeska. Taber later appeared with Richard Mansfield. In 1888 he joined the company of the actress Julia Marlowe and became the company's leading man.
During 1890 and 1891 he appeared in the companies of Augustin Daly and Richard Mansfield, returning to Julia Marlowe's company in late 1891, appearing with her in Twelfth Night in 1892. In 1896 he appeared as Captain Absolute in a production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals with his wife Julia Marlowe, Joseph Jefferson and Louisa Lane Drew at Macauley's Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky.
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Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (Hindi: अहमद सलमान रुशदी (Devanagari), احمد سلمان رشدی (Nastaʿlīq); /sælˈmɑːn ˈrʊʃdi/; born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West.
His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989.
Rushdie was appointed Commandeur dans Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II dubbed him Knight Bachelor for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.
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Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age." His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a "huge literary influence."
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Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir (French pronunciation: [simɔn də boˈvwaʁ]; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986), was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, political activist, feminist theorist and social theorist. She did not consider herself a philosopher but her significant contributions to existentialism and feminist existentialism have solidified her legacy as a philosopher and feminist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, the eldest daughter of Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a legal secretary who once aspired to be an actor, and Françoise (born) Brasseur, a wealthy banker’s daughter and devout Catholic. Her younger sister, Hélène, was born two years later. The family struggled to maintain their bourgeois status after losing much of their fortune shortly after World War I, and Françoise insisted that the two daughters be sent to a prestigious convent school. Beauvoir herself was deeply religious as a child—at one point intending to become a nun—until a crisis of faith at age 14. She remained an atheist for the rest of her life.
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Stephen Mailer
Stephen McLeod Mailer (born March 10, 1966) is an American stage and screen actor. His credits include appearances in films like A League of Their Own, Cry Baby, and Baby Mama, and the television shows Gilmore Girls and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Mailer was born in New York City, New York, the son of novelist Norman Mailer and stage actress Beverly Bentley. He was married to producer Lindsay Marx. He is currently married to Elizabeth Rainer.
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Steven Millhauser
Steven Millhauser (born August 3, 1943) is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Martin Dressler. The prize brought many of his older books back into print.
Millhauser was born in New York City, grew up in Connecticut, and earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965. He then pursued a doctorate in English at Brown University. He never completed his dissertation but wrote parts of Edwin Mullhouse and From the Realm of Morpheus in two separate stays at Brown. Between times at the university, he wrote Portrait of a Romantic at his parents' house in Connecticut. His story "The Invention of Robert Herendeen" (in The Barnum Museum) features a failed student who has moved back in with his parents; the story is loosely based on this period of Millhauser's life.
Until the Pulitzer Prize, Millhauser was best known for his 1972 debut novel, Edwin Mullhouse. This novel, about a precocious writer whose career ends abruptly with his death at age eleven, features the fictional Jeffrey Cartwright playing Boswell to Edwin's Johnson. Edwin Mullhouse brought critical acclaim, and Millhauser followed with a second novel, Portrait of a Romantic, in 1977, and his first collection of short stories, In The Penny Arcade, in 1986.
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Theodore H. White
Theodore Harold White (May 6, 1915 – May 15, 1986) was an American political journalist, historian, and novelist, known for his wartime reporting from China and accounts of the 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972 and 1980 presidential elections.
Born May 15, 1915, in Dorchester, Boston, the son of a lawyer named David White. In his book In Search of History: A Personal Adventure, White describes his life growing up as a Jew in Boston's Jewish ghetto, attending Hebrew school (where he developed an interest in Tanakh and could still recall many of its phrases decades later in their original language) and helping form one of the early Zionist collegiate organizations during his time in college. Based upon his academic achievements at Boston Latin School, from which he graduated in 1932 and where he was driven to succeed in the wake of his father's death, White received a scholarship to Harvard University in 1934.
White graduated from Harvard in 1938 summa cum laude (Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. was a classmate), with a degree in Chinese history and studies, the first student of John K. Fairbank. Awarded a traveling fellowship for round-the world journey, he ended up in Chungking (Chongqing), China's wartime capital, on a fellowship and later became a freelance reporter after briefly starting out with the only job he could find: as an adviser to China's propaganda agency. When Henry R. Luce, the China-born founder and publisher of Time magazine, learned of White´s expertise, he hired him and then came to China the following year, when the two became friends. White became the China correspondent for Time during the war. White chafed at the restrictions put on his reporting by the censorship of the Nationalist government and the rewriting of his stories by the editors at Time.
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Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur.
Mann was born Paul Thomas Mann in Lübeck, Germany, and was the second son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (a senator and a grain merchant), and his wife Júlia da Silva Bruhns (a Brazilian of partial German ancestry who emigrated to Germany when seven years old). His mother was Roman Catholic, but Mann was baptised into his father's Lutheran faith. Mann's father died in 1891, and his trading firm was liquidated. The family subsequently moved to Munich. Mann attended the science division of a Lübeck Gymnasium (school), then spent time at the Ludwig Maximillians University of Munich and Technical University of Munich where, in preparation for a journalism career, he studied history, economics, art history and literature.
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Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved. She also was commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. She won the Nobel Prize in 1993 and in 1987 the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. In April 2012, it was announced she would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and on 29 May 2012, she received the award.
Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. She is the second of four children in a working-class family. As a child, Morrison read fervently; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. Morrison's father told her numerous folktales of the black community (a method of storytelling that would later work its way into Morrison's writings).
In 1949 Morrison entered Howard University, where she received a B.A. in English in 1953. She earned a Master of Arts degree in English from Cornell University in 1955, for which she wrote a thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. After graduation, Morrison became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas (1955–57), then returned to Howard to teach English. She became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
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Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons (September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984), known as Truman Capote ( /ˈtruːmən kəˈpoʊtiː/), was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays.
Capote rose above a childhood troubled by divorce, a long absence from his mother and multiple migrations. He had discovered his calling as a writer by the age of 11, and for the rest of his childhood he honed his writing ability. Capote began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of one story, "Miriam" (1945), attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, resulting in a contract to write Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood (1966), a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home, a book Capote spent four years writing, with much help from Harper Lee, who wrote the famous To Kill a Mockingbird. A milestone in popular culture, In Cold Blood was the peak of his literary career, though it was not his final book. In the 1970s, he maintained his celebrity status by appearing on television talk shows.
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Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of South Vietnam, supported by the United States and other anti-communist countries. The Viet Cong (also known as the National Liberation Front, or NLF), a lightly armed South Vietnamese communist-controlled common front, largely fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in the region. The Vietnam People's Army (North Vietnamese Army) engaged in a more conventional war, at times committing large units into battle. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery, and airstrikes.
The U.S. government viewed involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam as part of their wider strategy of containment. The North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong viewed the conflict as a colonial war, fought initially against France, backed by the U.S., and later against South Vietnam, which it regarded as a U.S. puppet state. American military advisors arrived in what was then French Indochina beginning in 1950. U.S. involvement escalated in the early 1960s, with troop levels tripling in 1961 and tripling again in 1962. U.S. combat units were deployed beginning in 1965. Operations spanned international borders, with Laos and Cambodia heavily bombed. American involvement in the war peaked in 1968, at the time of the Tet Offensive. After this, U.S. ground forces were gradually withdrawn as part of a policy known as Vietnamization. Despite the Paris Peace Accords, signed by all parties in January 1973, fighting continued.
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Waldo Frank
Waldo Frank (August 25, 1889, Long Branch, New Jersey – January 9, 1967, White Plains, New York) was a prolific novelist, historian, literary and social critic. Most well-known for his studies of Spanish and Latin American literature, Frank served as chairman of the First Americans Writers Congress (April 26-27-28, 1935) and became the first president of the League of American Writers.
Frank was born into a comfortably well-off Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. He was a precocious intellect, and was expelled from high school for refusing to take a Shakespeare course saying that he knew more than the teacher. He completed boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland and returned to the United States to take a B.A. and an M.A. from Yale University in 1911.
Frank's first published novel, The Unwelcome Man (1917), was a psychoanalytic look into a man contemplating suicide. The novel drew upon the ideas of New England transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman.
In 1916, he was made associate editor of The Seven Arts, a journal which ran for just twelve issues but became an important artistic and political journal. With the determined pacifism of its contributors (which also included Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and James Oppenheim, the founder and general editor of the magazine) came a cessation of funds which led to its demise. Frank also became a regular contributor to the New Yorker in 1925 under the pseudonym, "Search-light." That same year he was named contributing editor of The New Republic. His cultural study of Spain, Virgin Spain (1926), was mocked and ridiculed by Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon (1932).
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Will Durant
William James Durant (November 5, 1885 – November 7, 1981) was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for The Story of Civilization, 11 volumes written in collaboration with his wife Ariel Durant and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy, written in 1926, which one observer described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy."
He conceived of philosophy as total perspective, or, seeing things "sub specie totius," a phrase inspired by Spinoza's "sub specie aeternitatis." He sought to unify and humanize the great body of historical knowledge, which had grown too voluminous and become fragmented into esoteric specialties, and to vitalize it for contemporary application. Durant was a gifted prose stylist and storyteller who won a large readership in great part because of the nature and excellence of his writing, which, in contrast to formal academic language, is lively, witty, charismatic, colourful, ornate, epigrammatic, in short, "humanized." Max Schuster, co-founder of the publisher Simon & Schuster (which also published Durant's works), and himself an admirer of Durant's writings for their beauty, remarked that Durant's prose "begs to be read aloud."John Little, who founded and heads the Will Durant foundation and has devoted much effort towards popularizing Durant's works in the 21st century, echoes Schuster's admiration for Durant's works in words which Durant himself sometimes used to describe a few of the finest works of Classical Antiquity: "prose so beautiful it rivals poetry."
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William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner (born Falkner, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career. He is primarily known and acclaimed for his novels and short stories, many of which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner created based on Lafayette County, where he spent most of his childhood, and Holly Springs/Marshall County.
Faulkner is one of the most important writers of the Southern literature of the United States, along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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Woody Allen
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg, December 1, 1935) is an award-winning American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, and playwright, whose career spans over half a century.
He began as a comedy writer in the 1950s, penning jokes and scripts for television and also publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen started performing as a stand-up comic, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comic, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he insists is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.
By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into more dramatic material influenced by European art films during the 1970s. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late '70s. Allen often stars in his own films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. The best-known of his over 40 films include the Academy Award-winners Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Midnight in Paris (2011); and the Golden Globe-winning The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Critic Roger Ebert has described Allen as "a treasure of the cinema."
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Mailer, Norman Filmography
- Norman Mailer: The American (2010)
- The Naked and the Dead (2010)
- Ptown Diaries (2009)
- Henry Kissinger - Geheimnisse einer Supermacht (2008)
- Oswald's Ghost (2007)
- Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story (2005)
- Inside Deep Throat (2005)
- The Ballad of Greenwich Village (2005)
- The Outsider (2005)
- Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire (2004)
- Le monde selon Bush (2004)
- Norman Mailer: My Life (2003)
- The Battle for 'I Am Curious-Yellow' (2003)
- Norman Mailer in Provincetown (2003)
- Stone Reader (2002)
- Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story (2002)
- Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story (2002)
- L'étrange festival (2001)
- American Tragedy (2000)
- Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale (2000)
- Time of Her Time (2000)
- New York in the 50's (2000)
- Cremaster 2 (1999)
- When We Were Kings (1996)
- Marilyn Monroe: Life After Death (1994)
- The Odyssey of John Dos Passos (1994)
- The Obit Writer (1993)
- Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987)
- King Lear (1987)
- King Lear (1987)
- Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987)
- Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987)
- Omnibus: The Last Moguls (1986)
- Empire City (1985)
- The Executioner's Song (1982)
- The Executioner's Song (1982)
- Norman Mailer: The Sanction to Write (1982)
- James Cagney: That Yankee Doodle Dandy (1981)
- Ragtime (1981)
- Marilyn: The Untold Story (1980)
- Town Bloody Hall (1979)
- Town Bloody Hall (1979)
- The 49th Annual Academy Awards (1977)
- Year of the Woman (1973)
- Andare e venire (1972)
- Maidstone (1970)
- Double Pisces, Scorpio Rising (1970)
- Maidstone (1970)
- Maidstone (1970)
- Maidstone (1970)
- Maidstone (1970)
- Muhammad Ali, the Greatest (1969)
- Diaries Notes and Sketches (1969)
- Wild 90 (1968)
- Beyond the Law (1968)
- Beyond the Law (1968)
- Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? (1968)
- Wild 90 (1968)
- Beyond the Law (1968)
- Beyond the Law (1968)
- Wild 90 (1968)
- Beyond the Law (1968)
- An American Dream (1966)
- The Naked and the Dead (1958)
Famous quotes by Norman Mailer:
"Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men."
"I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it."
"Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts."
"A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped."
"One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness -- the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others."
"There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same."
"I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses."
"There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be."
"Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor."
"Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another."
"Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men."
"I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it."
"Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts."
"A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped."
"One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness -- the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others."
"There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same."
"I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses."
"There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be."
"Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor."
"Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another."
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Norman Mailer interviewed by Martin Amis, 1991. (1 of 4)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:00
- Updated: 05 Dec 2012
British TV.
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_interviewed_by_Martin_Amis,_1991_1_of_4
Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal Feud on the Dick Cavett Show
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:52
- Updated: 15 Dec 2012
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_and_Gore_Vidal_Feud_on_the_Dick_Cavett_Show
William Buckley Interviews Norman Mailer on Firing Line (1968) Part 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:31
- Updated: 15 Dec 2012
http://wn.com/William_Buckley_Interviews_Norman_Mailer_on_Firing_Line_1968_Part_1
Norman Mailer on Dicks, Homosexuals & Facism
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:09
- Updated: 14 Dec 2012
The Avenger holds court among harridans. From the unreleased DA Pennebaker film "Town Bloody Hall". "Not mine, buddy."
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_on_Dicks,_Homosexuals_Facism
The Avenger holds court among harridans. From the unreleased DA Pennebaker film "Town Bloody Hall". "Not mine, buddy."
- published: 02 Jan 2010
- views: 9576
- author: tworeeler
Mailer on Mailer
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:52
- Updated: 10 Dec 2012
Part 1 from American Masters. Mailer on Mailer. Interviews with Norman Mailer.
http://wn.com/Mailer_on_Mailer
Part 1 from American Masters. Mailer on Mailer. Interviews with Norman Mailer.
- published: 16 Aug 2010
- views: 3688
- author: veep23
Why Norman Mailer Was So Infuriating
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:58
- Updated: 30 Nov 2012
The famous clash between the author and Dick Cavett was triggered, in part, by Mailer's misunderstanding of what an "interview" is supposed to be.
http://wn.com/Why_Norman_Mailer_Was_So_Infuriating
The famous clash between the author and Dick Cavett was triggered, in part, by Mailer's misunderstanding of what an "interview" is supposed to be.
- published: 24 Apr 2012
- views: 6912
- author: bigthink
Rip Torn vs Norman Mailer - the infamous "Maidstone" brawl - UNCUT!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:58
- Updated: 15 Dec 2012
This is the final scene from Norman Mailer's MAIDSTONE, in which he played the part of a famous movie director running for President of the United States, who is supposed to be assassinated in the finale. Mailer concluded principal photography without resolving the final scene, and Rip Torn (playing his brother-in-law and assassin) allegedly decided to take it upon himself to "improvise" an attack by hitting Mailer on the head with a small hammer, drawing blood. Mailer retaliated by tackling and then nearly chewing Torn's ear off as they grappled viciously, and it rapidly escalated into an unhinged on-camera brawl as Mailer's horrified kids screamed in terror. This is the completely uncut sequence. I have to wonder how "unplanned" it was, as the camera is obviously following Rip closely in the moments before the attack, and if principal photography had finished the day before, why was the camera crew still hanging around filming Rip and the Mailer family? Its more like Mailer knew Rip would pull something for the camera, but didnt know what, and overreacted because he wasnt expecting him to use a real hammer and actually start hitting him with it. Mailer's verbal reaction is oddly artificial (although the ear chewing is very real and painful to watch) and his wife seems to be lurking just off camera, and then she suddenly starts screaming like a banshee, which is what sets the kids off. Rip seems to be truly apologetic and convincing in the moments after the fight, but ...
http://wn.com/Rip_Torn_vs_Norman_Mailer_the_infamous_Maidstone_brawl_UNCUT!
This is the final scene from Norman Mailer's MAIDSTONE, in which he played the part of a famous movie director running for President of the United States, who is supposed to be assassinated in the finale. Mailer concluded principal photography without resolving the final scene, and Rip Torn (playing his brother-in-law and assassin) allegedly decided to take it upon himself to "improvise" an attack by hitting Mailer on the head with a small hammer, drawing blood. Mailer retaliated by tackling and then nearly chewing Torn's ear off as they grappled viciously, and it rapidly escalated into an unhinged on-camera brawl as Mailer's horrified kids screamed in terror. This is the completely uncut sequence. I have to wonder how "unplanned" it was, as the camera is obviously following Rip closely in the moments before the attack, and if principal photography had finished the day before, why was the camera crew still hanging around filming Rip and the Mailer family? Its more like Mailer knew Rip would pull something for the camera, but didnt know what, and overreacted because he wasnt expecting him to use a real hammer and actually start hitting him with it. Mailer's verbal reaction is oddly artificial (although the ear chewing is very real and painful to watch) and his wife seems to be lurking just off camera, and then she suddenly starts screaming like a banshee, which is what sets the kids off. Rip seems to be truly apologetic and convincing in the moments after the fight, but ...
- published: 09 May 2009
- views: 232537
- author: cinemavirtualis
Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan Debating 1968
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 27:58
- Updated: 15 Dec 2012
Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan expound on violence, alienation and the electronic envelope. The clash of two great minds. (1968) www.cbc.ca
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_and_Marshall_McLuhan_Debating_1968
Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan expound on violence, alienation and the electronic envelope. The clash of two great minds. (1968) www.cbc.ca
- published: 17 Jun 2012
- views: 1782
- author: benforshay1
Gore Vidal on Norman Mailer
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:44
- Updated: 16 Oct 2012
From "The Politics of Culture" Dec 11 2007. KCRW own the audio.
http://wn.com/Gore_Vidal_on_Norman_Mailer
From "The Politics of Culture" Dec 11 2007. KCRW own the audio.
- published: 02 Jul 2012
- views: 4446
- author: Pumiceous
Norman Mailer Talks With Charlie Rose
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:23
- Updated: 16 Nov 2012
Author Norman Mailer says that he thinks "The Castle in the Forrest" is one of his major novels.
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_Talks_With_Charlie_Rose
Author Norman Mailer says that he thinks "The Castle in the Forrest" is one of his major novels.
- published: 08 Feb 2007
- views: 73049
- author: CharlieRose
Norman Mailer - Iraq and the American Right
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:17
- Updated: 16 Nov 2012
Complete video at: fora.tv Internationally acclaimed author and journalist Norman Mailer discusses his views on national pride, the Iraq war, and American Neoconservatives. This excerpt is taken from a program in which Norman Mailer talks with authors Gunter Grass and Andrew O'Hagan on the topic of "The 20th Century on Trial," and was recorded in collaboration with the New York Public Library. ----- The New York Public Library presents "The 20th Century on Trial" with Norman Mailer and Gunter Grass. Born in the 1920s, Gunter Grass and Norman Mailer went on to become grand men of letters. They witnessed the 20th century at close quarters. At the center of each writer's consciousness is the role of their respective countries in World War II and the legacy of violence and guilt that created the Cold War. Yet as stylists these two novelists appeared to internalize the great forces of their times: the appeal of totalitarianism and the cult of celebrity, the struggle for national definition and the psychology of sex. Mailer and Grass set out to create revolutions in the consciousness of their times, and now might be the moment to ask how the 20th century itself emerges from their work. What was that century? What would they write for its epitaph? Nobel Prize-Winner Gunter Grass's memoir "Peeling the Onion" takes him back to his wartime childhood and adolescence - it is a searing book that provides evidence on behalf of the self-accusing. Norman Mailer's latest novel, "The ...
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_Iraq_and_the_American_Right
Complete video at: fora.tv Internationally acclaimed author and journalist Norman Mailer discusses his views on national pride, the Iraq war, and American Neoconservatives. This excerpt is taken from a program in which Norman Mailer talks with authors Gunter Grass and Andrew O'Hagan on the topic of "The 20th Century on Trial," and was recorded in collaboration with the New York Public Library. ----- The New York Public Library presents "The 20th Century on Trial" with Norman Mailer and Gunter Grass. Born in the 1920s, Gunter Grass and Norman Mailer went on to become grand men of letters. They witnessed the 20th century at close quarters. At the center of each writer's consciousness is the role of their respective countries in World War II and the legacy of violence and guilt that created the Cold War. Yet as stylists these two novelists appeared to internalize the great forces of their times: the appeal of totalitarianism and the cult of celebrity, the struggle for national definition and the psychology of sex. Mailer and Grass set out to create revolutions in the consciousness of their times, and now might be the moment to ask how the 20th century itself emerges from their work. What was that century? What would they write for its epitaph? Nobel Prize-Winner Gunter Grass's memoir "Peeling the Onion" takes him back to his wartime childhood and adolescence - it is a searing book that provides evidence on behalf of the self-accusing. Norman Mailer's latest novel, "The ...
- published: 17 Aug 2007
- views: 30545
- author: ForaTv
Norman Mailer on Marijuana and Whiskey
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:58
- Updated: 09 Dec 2012
From the documentary "Norman Mailer on Norman Mailer."
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_on_Marijuana_and_Whiskey
From the documentary "Norman Mailer on Norman Mailer."
- published: 29 Nov 2009
- views: 16516
- author: discardedaudio
Norman Mailer on Computers
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:06
- Updated: 16 Jul 2012
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_on_Computers
Norman Mailer on Fiction
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:56
- Updated: 31 Aug 2012
It's all fiction
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_on_Fiction
Norman Mailer: The American Trailer
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:20
- Updated: 16 Oct 2012
Provocateur, rebel, performer, and true American. Here's a look into the life of a complex, intellectual, working-class hero. He wrote over 60 books and covered every major event in US History. He not only wrote about events, he experienced them firsthand. He delved deep into the lives and psyches of the famous and the infamous - from Monroe to Hitler. With never-before-seen footage of Adele Morales Mailer's startling revelations after being stabbed by her husband. Featuring wives and lovers, enemies and admirers, his children and the man himself, this is Norman Mailer as you've never seen him before. Follow us: www.normanmailertheamerican.com http www.facebook.com
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_The_American_Trailer
Provocateur, rebel, performer, and true American. Here's a look into the life of a complex, intellectual, working-class hero. He wrote over 60 books and covered every major event in US History. He not only wrote about events, he experienced them firsthand. He delved deep into the lives and psyches of the famous and the infamous - from Monroe to Hitler. With never-before-seen footage of Adele Morales Mailer's startling revelations after being stabbed by her husband. Featuring wives and lovers, enemies and admirers, his children and the man himself, this is Norman Mailer as you've never seen him before. Follow us: www.normanmailertheamerican.com http www.facebook.com
- published: 06 Aug 2010
- views: 14810
- author: EraserFilmsLTD
Norman Mailer on Success
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:48
- Updated: 02 Feb 2012
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_on_Success
Norman Mailer discusses his protagonists and their penises
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:30
- Updated: 06 Sep 2012
A short clip from the terrific documentary "Town Bloody Hall" (available at phfilms.com), which chronicles Norman Mailer's raucous debate with a group of feminists (Germaine Greer is featured in this clip) at NYC's Town Hall in 1971. Here he is asked about the names his characters give their penises.
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_discusses_his_protagonists_and_their_penises
A short clip from the terrific documentary "Town Bloody Hall" (available at phfilms.com), which chronicles Norman Mailer's raucous debate with a group of feminists (Germaine Greer is featured in this clip) at NYC's Town Hall in 1971. Here he is asked about the names his characters give their penises.
- published: 23 Nov 2007
- views: 34575
- author: byebyemonkey
Norman Mailer talks about plastic and violence
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:20
- Updated: 23 Sep 2012
In a brilliant French TV documentary, Mailer holds forth on the ways in which plastic represents the changes in American society, and how the deadening of the senses leads to violence. In the process, he reflects on the infamous incident in which he stabbed his wife in the early '60s. This has been posted to illustrate a blog entry on the Media Funhouse blog, which can be found here: www.mediafunhouse.blogspot.com
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_talks_about_plastic_and_violence
In a brilliant French TV documentary, Mailer holds forth on the ways in which plastic represents the changes in American society, and how the deadening of the senses leads to violence. In the process, he reflects on the infamous incident in which he stabbed his wife in the early '60s. This has been posted to illustrate a blog entry on the Media Funhouse blog, which can be found here: www.mediafunhouse.blogspot.com
- published: 11 Jan 2008
- views: 10498
- author: byebyemonkey
William Buckley Interviews Norman Mailer on Firing Line (1968) Part 2
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:01
- Updated: 02 Dec 2012
http://wn.com/William_Buckley_Interviews_Norman_Mailer_on_Firing_Line_1968_Part_2
Norman Mailer: The American
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 85:39
- Updated: 13 Oct 2012
A provocateur, a rebel, a performer and notorious anarchist, Norman Mailer never stopped giving people something to talk about. Containing never-seen-before material, this shocking doc goes beyond the Mailer of the bookshelves and bestseller lists to reveal Mailer the social critic, filmmaker, family man and lover, giving a rare and unique insight into the life of a complex, intellectual man and villainous hero. "Are you all truly idiots, or is it me?" he spits at a studio audience during a TV interview. Never one to mince his words, Norman Mailer was at once a journalist, novelist, poet, filmmaker, political activist, mayoral candidate and hell-raising socialite. Every aspect of his life was prolific and controversial, down to his six wives, nine children and numerous affairs. Even his relationship with the country he loved to write about was full of turmoil. "I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it; I'm repelled by it." The man who once announced, "The greatest trouble with this country is that it is insane", came ironically to be widely regarded as an American icon, wildly living out his own definition of his beloved nation. From Marilyn Monroe hiding in her bedroom from him to him head-butting Gore Vidal, from debates and ideas to sex tapes, orgies and drag queens, this fast-paced doc offers a wonderfully revelatory profile of an iconic figure of 20th Century Americana. Watch more - Visit: www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_The_American
A provocateur, a rebel, a performer and notorious anarchist, Norman Mailer never stopped giving people something to talk about. Containing never-seen-before material, this shocking doc goes beyond the Mailer of the bookshelves and bestseller lists to reveal Mailer the social critic, filmmaker, family man and lover, giving a rare and unique insight into the life of a complex, intellectual man and villainous hero. "Are you all truly idiots, or is it me?" he spits at a studio audience during a TV interview. Never one to mince his words, Norman Mailer was at once a journalist, novelist, poet, filmmaker, political activist, mayoral candidate and hell-raising socialite. Every aspect of his life was prolific and controversial, down to his six wives, nine children and numerous affairs. Even his relationship with the country he loved to write about was full of turmoil. "I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I'm charmed by it; I'm repelled by it." The man who once announced, "The greatest trouble with this country is that it is insane", came ironically to be widely regarded as an American icon, wildly living out his own definition of his beloved nation. From Marilyn Monroe hiding in her bedroom from him to him head-butting Gore Vidal, from debates and ideas to sex tapes, orgies and drag queens, this fast-paced doc offers a wonderfully revelatory profile of an iconic figure of 20th Century Americana. Watch more - Visit: www.youtube.com
- published: 02 Dec 2011
- views: 304
- author: JourneymanVOD
![Norman Mailer on Bookworm, Part One [1991]](http://web.archive.org./web/20121216203713im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rHMJ4dMUAfE/default.jpg "Norman Mailer on Bookworm, Part One [1991]")
Norman Mailer on Bookworm, Part One [1991]
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 28:50
- Updated: 14 Sep 2012
Norman Mailer on Bookworm, circa Dec 2 1991, discussing "Harlot's Ghost." Michael Silverblatt interviews. Audio is crackly and poppy.
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_on_Bookworm,_Part_One_1991_
Norman Mailer on Bookworm, circa Dec 2 1991, discussing "Harlot's Ghost." Michael Silverblatt interviews. Audio is crackly and poppy.
- published: 29 Aug 2012
- views: 174
- author: Pumiceous
Norman Mailer
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:04
- Updated: 28 Jul 2012
Norman Mailer - Oh My America (1999) [Extract only]
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer
Norman Mailer - Oh My America (1999) [Extract only]
- published: 25 Aug 2008
- views: 1145
- author: idiolekt
Norman Mailer bonked
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:56
- Updated: 07 Nov 2012
Have hammer will draw blood. Scene from Maidstone, Norman Mailer's third film. Rip Torn was to assassinate Mailer's character, Norman Kinglsey, and he took it to heart. This must be the method acting style. Ear-biting to follow. For DVD see cinephile.blujay.com
http://wn.com/Norman_Mailer_bonked
Have hammer will draw blood. Scene from Maidstone, Norman Mailer's third film. Rip Torn was to assassinate Mailer's character, Norman Kinglsey, and he took it to heart. This must be the method acting style. Ear-biting to follow. For DVD see cinephile.blujay.com
- published: 03 Apr 2010
- views: 9089
- author: Jess Greco
photo: AP / Nick Ut
14 Dec 2012
Former President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, meet 55-year-old Martha Sellers. For the past nine years, Sellers has worked as a Walmart cashier in Paramount, California ... More than 10,000 community members joined more than 30 striking employees who walked off the job to demand better working conditions. . "It was wonderful ... That's not too much to ask for." ... 1698 ... ....(size: 23.6Kb)
photo: AP / Newtown Bee, Shannon Hicks
15 Dec 2012
The massacre of 26 children and adults at an elementary school in the US state of Connecticut elicited horror and soul-searching around the world even as it raised more basic questions about why the gunman, a 20-year-old described as brilliant but remote, would have been driven to such a crime and how he chose his victims ... He paused for several seconds to keep his composure as he teared up and wiped an eye ... ... "I'm numb ... Yes, yeah....(size: 8.8Kb)
photo: AP / Newtown Bee, Shannon Hicks
15 Dec 2012
Newtown, Conn. Twenty schoolchildren were slaughtered by a heavily armed gunman who opened fire at a suburban elementary school in Connecticut on Friday, ultimately killing at least 27 people including himself in the one of the worst mass shootings in US history ... Authorities found 18 children and seven adults, including the gunman, dead at the school, and two children were pronounced dead later after being taken to a hospital ... Reuters ....(size: 7.5Kb)
photo: AP / Manu Brabo
14 Dec 2012
One of Syria's key allies has admitted for the first time the Assad regime is losing the 20-month ground war. Russia’s deputy foreign minister’s comments are significant because Russia has blocked action to stem the violence, supplied weapons to the Assad regime, and vetoed three UN resolutions -- even as other countries called for Assad to step down. The comments are expected to put new pressure on the Syrian leader ... Reporter ... ... ....(size: 6.6Kb)
photo: AP / Jessica Hill
14 Dec 2012
More than two dozen people, mostly elementary school children, were shot and killed at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school this morning, federal and state sources tell ABC News. The massacre involved two gunmen at a Connecticut school this morning, prompting the town of Newtown to lock down all of its schools and draw SWAT teams to the school, authorities said today. State Police confirm that one shooter is dead ... at ABCNews.com ... ....(size: 4.5Kb)
Buffalo News
16 Dec 2012
Selected Letters of William Styron edited by Rose Styron with R ... What is undeniable is that Styron was a great – truly irresistible – letter writer, wildly and savagely readable and trustworthy, even in idiosyncratic judgment, whether confiding to James Jones the size of child JFK Jr.’s private parts or nemesis Norman Mailer’s halitosis problems. Here is Styron in 1960 writing to John P. Marquand Jr....(size: 2.5Kb)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
15 Dec 2012
A FEW years ago, the novelist Gary Shteyngart, whose books are very funny and very sad, gave an interview to a magazine called Modern Drunkard. (Yes, this magazine actually exists.) It's the funniest and saddest interview I've ever read. In it, Mr ... "There are so few people to drink with," he said ... I'm all alone." Mr ... He added ... L ... And there's still a sense that Norman Mailer might walk in, looking to punch some cretin out....(size: 19.0Kb)
The Miami Herald
14 Dec 2012
. ... One contemporary he admired was Norman Mailer ... Mailer was in awe of Lie Down in Darkness, Styron’s spectacular debut, and thought his short novel The Long March, a flawless indictment of American militarism. But the bromance ended bitterly in 1958, when Mailer accused Styron of slandering his second wife, Adele (whom Mailer would later stab at a party, on an unrelated matter) ... Like Mailer, Styron suffered from wannabe machismo....(size: 4.8Kb)
The Examiner
14 Dec 2012
The new exhibit called "The Jazz Loft Project. Photographs and Tapes of W ... "The Jazz Loft Project. Photographs and Tapes of W ... Eugene Smith ... Other people featured in the exhibit photos include Norman Mailer, Salvador Dali, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier-Bresson ... ....(size: 1.3Kb)
Fresno Bee
11 Dec 2012
alone and topping bestseller lists for months ... James already was an underground hit before signing in early 2012 with Vintage Books, a paperback imprint of Random House Inc., the house of Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison, a house where legacy is inseparable from the brand ... "We talked about distribution, a physical format, publicity ... ....(size: 1.6Kb)
The Washington Post
11 Dec 2012
NEW YORK — The story of 2012 in publishing was the story of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” in more ways than one ... alone and topping bestseller lists for months ... Loading... Comments Weigh In Corrections? ... James already was an underground hit before signing in early 2012 with Vintage Books, a paperback imprint of Random House Inc., the house of Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison, a house where legacy is inseparable from the brand ... ....(size: 5.3Kb)
Seattle Post
11 Dec 2012
NEW YORK (AP) — The story of 2012 in publishing was the story of "Fifty Shades of Grey," in more ways than one ... alone and topping bestseller lists for months ... James already was an underground hit before signing in early 2012 with Vintage Books, a paperback imprint of Random House Inc., the house of Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison, a house where legacy is inseparable from the brand ... Everyone was in on the secret ... In April, the U.S ... ....(size: 5.4Kb)
Sacramento Bee
11 Dec 2012
NEW YORK -- The story of 2012 in publishing was the story of "Fifty Shades of Grey," in more ways than one ... alone and topping bestseller lists for months ... James already was an underground hit before signing in early 2012 with Vintage Books, a paperback imprint of Random House Inc., the house of Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison, a house where legacy is inseparable from the brand ... Everyone was in on the secret ... In April, the U.S....(size: 5.4Kb)
Star Tribune
11 Dec 2012
NEW YORK - The story of 2012 in publishing was the story of "Fifty Shades of Grey," in more ways than one ... alone and topping bestseller lists for months ... James already was an underground hit before signing in early 2012 with Vintage Books, a paperback imprint of Random House Inc., the house of Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison, a house where legacy is inseparable from the brand ... "We talked about distribution, a physical format, publicity....(size: 6.0Kb)
The Washington Times
11 Dec 2012
NEW YORK (AP) - The story of 2012 in publishing was the story of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” in more ways than one ... alone and topping bestseller lists for months ... James already was an underground hit before signing in early 2012 with Vintage Books, a paperback imprint of Random House Inc., the house of Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison, a house where legacy is inseparable from the brand ... Everyone was in on the secret ... Comments....(size: 8.9Kb)
The Guardian
11 Dec 2012
On Warne is not a biography, but a portrait, and expertly painted. The only quibble is there is just not enough of it. Gideon Haigh's portrait of Shane Warne is a wonderful mix of anecdotes, statistics, quotations and observations. Photograph ... I canot print them here ... It is, really, an entertaining series of essays on masculinity, class and cricket, which is why Vaughan ends up sharing page-space with Camille Paglia and Norman Mailer ... ... ....(size: 13.1Kb)
Herald Tribune
09 Dec 2012
Author Norman Mailer called Capote “the most perfect writer of my generation.” ... And he rubbed elbows with Johnny Carson and Andy Warhol.</p><p>Author Norman Mailer called Capote “the most perfect writer of my generation.”</p><p>After “In Cold Blood,” Capote never finished another book, ......(size: 8.6Kb)
Tulsa World
09 Dec 2012
For more than 50 years, author Wendell Berry has made the decline of rural America the primary focus of his works ... About the award ... John Hope Franklin (1997), Neil Simon (1996), David McCullough (1995), Ray Bradbury (1994), Peter Matthiessen (1993), Norman Mailer (1992), Eudora Welty (1991), John le Carré (1990), Saul Bellow (1989), Toni Morrison (1988), John Updike (1987), Larry McMurtry (1986) and Norman Cousins (1985) ... ....(size: 5.2Kb)
| Norman Mailer | |
|---|---|
 Norman Mailer photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1948 |
|
| Born | Norman Kingsley Mailer (1923-01-31)January 31, 1923 Long Branch, New Jersey |
| Died | November 10, 2007(2007-11-10) (aged 84) New York City, New York |
| Pen name | Andreas Wilson |
| Occupation | Novelist, essayist, journalist, columnist, poet, playwright |
| Nationality | American |
| Genres | Fiction, non-fiction |
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Influenced
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 Literature portal |
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Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 - November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, John McPhee, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with John Wilcock, Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts and politics oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he received the lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.[1]
In 1992, Mailer received the annual Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award presented by the Tulsa Library Trust.
Contents |
Early life[link]
Norman Kingsley Mailer was born to a well-known Jewish family in Long Branch. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, was a South African-born accountant, and his mother, Fanny Schneider, ran a housekeeping and nursing agency. Mailer's sister, Barbara, was born in 1927.[2] His second sister, Norma, was born in 1930.[2] Raised in Brooklyn, New York, he graduated from Boys' High School and entered Harvard University in 1939, where he studied aeronautical engineering. At Harvard, he became interested in writing and published his first story at the age of 18, winning Story magazine's college contest in 1941. As an undergraduate, he was a member of The Signet Society. After graduating in 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. In World War II, he served in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry. He was not involved in much combat and completed his service as a cook,[2] but the experience provided enough material for The Naked and the Dead.
Literary career[link]
Novels[link]
In 1948, while continuing his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, Mailer published The Naked and the Dead, based on his military service in World War II. A New York Times best seller for 62 weeks, it was hailed by many as one of the best American wartime novels and named one of the "one hundred best novels in English language" by the Modern Library.
Barbary Shore (1951) was a surreal parable of Cold War left politics set in a Brooklyn rooming-house. His 1955 novel The Deer Park drew on his experiences working as a screenwriter in Hollywood in 1949–50. It was initially rejected by seven publishers due to its purportedly sexual content before being published by Putnam's.
In the tradition of Dickens and Dostoevsky, Mailer wrote his fourth novel, An American Dream, as a serial in Esquire magazine over eight months (January to August 1964), publishing the first chapter only two months after he wrote it. In March 1965, Dial Press published a revised version. His editor was E. L. Doctorow. The novel received mixed reviews, but was a best seller. Joan Didion praised it in a review in National Review (April 20, 1965) and John W. Aldridge did the same in Life (March 19, 1965), while Elizabeth Hardwick panned it in Partisan Review (spring 1965). Except for a brief period, the novel has never gone out of print.
In 1980, The Executioner's Song—Mailer's novelization of the life and death of murderer Gary Gilmore—won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Mailer spent a longer time writing Ancient Evenings—his novel of Egypt in the XX dynasty (about 1100 BCE.)—than any of his other books, working on it off and on from 1972 until 1983. It was also a bestseller, although reviews were generally negative.
Harlot's Ghost, Mailer's longest novel (1310 pages), appeared in 1991. It is an exploration of the unspoken dramas of the CIA from the end of WWII to 1965. He performed a huge amount of research for the novel, which is still on CIA reading lists. He ended the novel with the words "To be continued," and planned to write a sequel, titled Harlot's Grave. But other projects intervened and he never wrote it. Harlot's Ghost sold well.
His final novel, The Castle in the Forest, which focused on Hitler's childhood, reached number five on the Times best-seller list after publication in January 2007, and received stronger reviews than any of his books since The Executioner's Song. Castle was intended to be the first volume of a trilogy, but Mailer died several months after it was completed. The Castle in the Forest was awarded a Bad Sex in Fiction Award by the Literary Review magazine.[3]
Mailer wrote over 40 books. He published 11 novels over a 59-year span.
The New Journalism[link]
From the mid-1950s, Mailer became known for his counter-cultural essays. In 1955, he co-founded The Village Voice for which he wrote a column from January to April 1956.[4] Mailer's famous essay "The White Negro"[5] (1957) "analyzes and partly defends the moral radicalism of the outsider and hipster."[5][6] It is one of the most anthologized, and controversial, essays of the postwar period.
In 1960, Mailer wrote "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" for Esquire magazine, an account of the emergence of John F. Kennedy during the Democratic party convention. The essay was an important breakthrough for the New Journalism of the nineteen sixties. Mailer's contributions to the New Journalism include major books such as The Armies of the Night (1968), awarded a National Book Award[7] and a Pulitzer Prize; Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968); Of a Fire on the Moon (1971); and The Prisoner of Sex (1971). Hallmarks of these works are a highly subjectivized style and a greater application of techniques from fiction-writing than common in journalism.
Mailer wrote a Playboy article about Elmo Henderson, a boxer who had defeated Muhammad Ali in 1972.[8] In the 1970s Henderson filed a $1 million libel action against Mailer and Playboy. The magazine and Mailer lost the lawsuit.[9]
Work for film[link]
In addition to his experimental fiction and nonfiction novels, Mailer produced a play version of The Deer Park (staged at the Theatre De Lys in Greenwich Village in 1967[10]), and in the late 1960s directed a number of improvisational avant-garde films in a Warhol style, including Maidstone (1970), which includes a spontaneous and brutal brawl between Norman T. Kingsley, played by Mailer, and Kingsley's brother, played by Rip Torn. Mailer received a head injury when Torn struck him with a hammer. In 1987, he adapted and directed a film version of his novel Tough Guys Don't Dance, starring Ryan O'Neal and Isabella Rossellini, which has become a minor camp classic.
Political activism[link]
A number of Mailer's nonfiction works, such as The Armies of the Night and The Presidential Papers, are political. He covered the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1992, and 1996, although his account of the 1996 Democratic convention has never been published. In the early 1960s he was fixated on the figure of President John F. Kennedy, whom he regarded as an "existential hero." In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s and 1970s his work mingled autobiography, social commentary, history, fiction, and poetry in a formally original way that influenced the development of New Journalism.
In September of 1961 Mailer was one of the original original twenty-nine prominent American sponsors of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee organization that was the same organization that alleged John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald also became a member of in 1963. In December of 1963 Mailer and several of the other sponsors left it. (some of the original twenty-nine sponsors of the group included Truman Capote, Robert Taber, James Baldwin, Robert F. Williams, Waldo Frank, Carleton Beals, Simone de Beauvoir, Robert Colodny, Donald Harrington, and Jean Paul Sartre[11])
In October 1967, he was arrested for his involvement in an anti-Vietnam War demonstration at the Pentagon. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[12]
At the December 15, 1971, taping of The Dick Cavett Show, with Janet Flanner and Gore Vidal, Mailer, annoyed with a less-than-stellar review by Vidal of Prisoner of Sex, apparently headbutted Vidal and traded insults with him backstage.[13] As the show began taping, a visibly belligerent Mailer, who admitted he had been drinking,[13] goaded Vidal and Cavett into trading insults with him on air and continually referred to his "greater intellect". He openly taunted and mocked Vidal (who responded in kind), finally earning the ire of Flanner, who announced that the discussion had become "extremely boring", telling Mailer "You act as if you're the only people here." As Cavett made jokes comparing Mailer's intellect to his ego, Mailer stated "Why don't you look at your question sheet and ask your question?", to which Cavett responded "Why don't you fold it 5 ways and shove it where the moon don't shine?"[13][14]
The headbutting and later on-air altercation was described by Mailer himself in his essay "Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots." The Wikipedia article about landmark episodes of the show states:
A 1971 interview with Norman Mailer was not going well. Mailer moved his chair away from the other guests (Gore Vidal and Janet Flanner), and Cavett joked that "perhaps you'd like two more chairs to contain your giant intellect?"[15] Mailer replied "I'll take the two chairs if you'll all accept finger-bowls." Mailer later said to Cavett "Why don't you look at your question sheet and ask your question?", to which Cavett replied "Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine?" A long laugh ensued, after which Mailer asked Cavett if he had come up with that line and Cavett replied "I have to tell you a quote from Tolstoy?".
In 1980, Mailer spearheaded convicted killer Jack Abbott's successful bid for parole. In 1977, Abbott had read about Mailer's work on The Executioner's Song and wrote to Mailer, offering to enlighten the author about Abbott's time behind bars and the conditions he was experiencing. Mailer, impressed, helped to publish In the Belly of the Beast, a book on life in the prison system consisting of Abbott's letters to Mailer. Once paroled, Abbott committed a murder in New York City six weeks after his release, stabbing to death 22-year-old Richard Adan. Consequently, Mailer was subject to criticism for his role. In a 1992 interview with the Buffalo News, he conceded that his involvement was "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in."[16]
In 1989, Mailer joined with a number of other prominent authors in publicly expressing support for colleague Salman Rushdie in the wake of the fatwa calling for Rushdie's assassination issued by Iran's Islamic government for his having authored The Satanic Verses.[17]
In 2003, in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, just before the invasion of Iraq, Mailer said: "Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it."[18]
From 1980 until his death in 2007, he contributed to Democratic Party candidacies for political office.[19]
Mayoral campaign[link]
Main article: New York City: the 51st State
In 1969, at the suggestion of Gloria Steinem,[20] his friend the political essayist Noel Parmentel and others, he ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic Party primary for Mayor of New York City, allied with columnist Jimmy Breslin (who ran for City Council President), proposing the creation a 51st state through New York City secession.[21] Although Mailer took stands on a wide range of issues, from opposing "compulsory fluoridation of the water supply" to advocating the release of Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, decentralization was the overriding issue of the campaign.[21] Mailer "foresaw the city, its independence secured, splintering into townships and neighborhoods, with their own school systems, police departments, housing programs, and governing philosophies."[22] Their slogan was "throw the rascals in". Mailer was endorsed by libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, who "believed that 'smashing the urban government apparatus and fragmenting it into a myriad of constituent fragments' offered the only answer to the ills plaguing American cities," and called Mailer's campaign “the most refreshing libertarian political campaign in decades.”[21][22] He came in fourth in a field of five.[23] Looking back on the campaign, journalist and historian Theodore White called it "one of the most serious campaigns run in the United States in the last five years. . . . [H]is campaign was considered and thoughtful, the beginning of an attempt to apply ideas to a political situation."[22]
Biographical subjects[link]
His biographical subjects included Pablo Picasso, Muhammad Ali, Gary Gilmore, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe[link]
Mailer's 1973 biography of Monroe (usually designated Marilyn: A Biography)[a] was particularly controversial. The book's final chapter states that Monroe was murdered by agents of the FBI and CIA who resented her supposed affair with Robert F. Kennedy. In his own 1987 autobiography Timebends, the playwright Arthur Miller, a former husband to Monroe, wrote scathingly of Mailer: "[Mailer] was himself in drag, acting out his own Hollywood fantasies of fame and sex unlimited and power."
The book was also enormously successful, selling more copies than any of his works except The Naked and the Dead. It remained in print for decades, but was out of print in the United States as of 2009[update].[citation needed]
Two later works co-written by Mailer presented imagined words and thoughts in Monroe's voice: the 1980 book Of Women and Their Elegance and the 1986 play Strawhead, which was produced off Broadway starring his daughter Kate Mailer.
Personal life[link]
Marriages and children[link]
Norman Mailer was married six times and had nine children. He fathered eight children by his various wives and also raised and informally adopted Norris' son from another marriage, Matthew.
Norman's first marriage was in 1944, to Beatrice Silverman, whom he divorced in 1952. They had one child, Susan.
Mailer married his second wife, Adele Morales, in 1954. They had two daughters, Danielle and Elizabeth. Mailer was violent to his wife.[24] He was at one time involuntarily committed to Bellevue Hospital for 17 days; his wife would not press charges, and he later pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of assault, and was given a suspended sentence.[25][26] While in the short term, Morales made a physical recovery, in 1997 she published a memoir of their marriage entitled The Last Party, which recounted her husband stabbing her at a party and the aftermath. This incident has been a focal point for feminist critics of Mailer, who point to themes of sexual violence in his work.[27]
His third wife, whom he married in 1962, and divorced in 1963, was the British heiress and journalist Lady Jeanne Campbell (1929–2007), the only daughter of Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll and a granddaughter of the press baron Lord Beaverbrook. The couple had a daughter, Kate Mailer, who is an actress.
His fourth marriage, in 1963, was to Beverly Bentley, a former model turned actress. She was the mother of his producer son Michael Mailer and his actor son Stephen Mailer. They divorced in 1980.
His fifth wife was Carol Stevens, a jazz singer whom he married on November 7, 1980, and divorced in Haiti on November 8, 1980, thereby legitimating their daughter Maggie, born in 1971.
His sixth and last wife, whom he married in 1980, was Norris Church Mailer (née Barbara Davis, 1949–2010), an art teacher. They had one son together, John Buffalo Mailer, a writer and actor, and Mailer informally adopted Matthew Norris, her son by her first husband, Larry Norris. Living in Brooklyn, New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts with Mailer, Church worked as a model, wrote and painted.
Works with his children[link]
In 2005, Mailer co-wrote a book with his youngest child, John Buffalo Mailer, titled The Big Empty.
Mailer appeared in an episode of Gilmore Girls entitled "Norman Mailer, I'm Pregnant!" with his son Stephen Mailer.
Death and legacy[link]
Mailer died of acute renal failure on November 10, 2007, a month after undergoing lung surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, New York.[28]
The papers of the two-time Pulitzer Prize author may be found at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.[29][30]
In 2008, Carole Mallory, a former mistress, sold seven boxes of documents and photographs to Harvard University, Norman Mailer's Alma Mater. They contain extracts of her letters, books and journals.[31][32]
In 2008, The Norman Mailer Center and The Norman Mailer Writers Colony, a non-profit organization for educational purposes, was established to honor Norman Mailer.[33] Among its programs is the Norman Mailer Prize established in 2009.
Cultural references[link]
- In the comedy Sleeper, Woody Allen remarks that Mailer "donated his ego to the Harvard Medical School."
- He's referenced in the Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Animal Bar" in the lyrics "Ever loving mug of Mr. Norman Mailer".
- Singer Lloyd Cole referenced Mailer in the song, "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken" with the line, "If you really want to get straight, read Norman Mailer, or get a new tailor."
- Rapper Talib Kweli, in single Get By, proclaims to "paint a picture with the pen like Norman Mailer".
- He is Also referenced in the 1993 PC game Sam and Max Hit the Road in a conversation with the fisherman in the world of Fish (this itself is a Woody Allen parody)
- Mentioned in the GWAR song "Vlad the Impaler", the subject of which is someone who "could've been a whaler, could've been a sailor, he turned out to be Norman Mailer."
Selected bibliography[link]
Fiction[link]
Novels
- The Naked and the Dead. New York: Rinehart, 1948.
- Barbary Shore. New York: Rinehart, 1951.
- The Deer Park. New York: Putnam's, 1955.
- An American Dream. New York: Dial, 1965.
- Why Are We in Vietnam? New York: Putnam's, 1967.
- The Executioner's Song Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979.
- Of Women and Their Elegance. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1980
- Ancient Evenings. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983.
- Tough Guys Don't Dance. New York: Random House, 1984.
- Harlot's Ghost. New York: Random House, 1991.
- The Gospel According to the Son. New York: Random House, 1997.
- The Castle in the Forest. New York: Random House, 2007.
Plays
- The Deer Park: A Play. New York: Dial, 1967.
Short Stories
- The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer. New York: Dell, 1967.
Non-fiction[link]
General non-fiction
- The Armies of the Night. New York: New American Library, 1968.
- Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968. New York: New American Library, 1968.
- Of a Fire on the Moon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.
- The Prisoner of Sex. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.[34]
- St. George and The Godfather. New York: Signet Classics, 1972.
- The Faith of Graffiti. New York: Praeger, 1974.
- The Fight. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975.
- Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots. Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1980.
- Why Are We At War?. New York: Random House, 2003 ISBN 978-0-8129-7111-8
- The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing. New York: Random House, 2003.
- The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, 2006
- On God: An Uncommon Conversation. New York: Random House, 2007 ISBN 978-1-4000-6732-9
Essay collections
- Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam's, 1959.
- The Presidential Papers.New York: Putnam, 1963.
- Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial, 1966.
- Pieces and Pontifications. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982.
Biographies
- Marilyn: A Biography.[a] New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973.
- Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.
- Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery. New York: Random House, 1996 ISBN 978-0-679-42535-9
Famous essays and articles
- "The White Negro". San Francisco: City Lights, 1957.
Notes[link]
- ^ a b The book is commonly referenced as Marilyn: A Biography, e.g. in Michael Lennon's Critical essays ... and an Oxford reference book. But that is a dubitable title. The display type on the title page begins with "Marilyn" on the top line, "a biography by" on another, and "Norman" and "Mailer" on two more.
References[link]
- ^ "Distinguished Contribution to American Letters". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-10.
(With acceptance speech by Mailer and introduction by Toni Morrison.) - ^ a b c "Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Dies at 84." New York Times. 2007-11-10.
- ^ "Late Mailer wins 'bad sex' award." BBC News. November 27, 2008.
- ^ "Villagevoice.com". Villagevoice.com. http://www.villagevoice.com/about/. Retrieved 2010-04-06.
- ^ a b "Norman Mailer (1924–2007)." Dissentmagazine.org.
- ^ Grundmann, Roy (2003). Andy Warhol's Blow job. Culture and the moving image. Temple University Press. pp. 169–177. ISBN 1-56639-972-6.
- ^ "National Book Awards – 1969". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-10.
The U.S. National Book Award in category Arts and Letters was awarded annually from 1964 to 1976. - ^ Spong, John. "The shot not heard round the world: the way Elmo Henderson tells it, his entire life can be boiled down to a single moment in 1972, when he stepped into the ring in San Antonio and knocked out the greatest fighter on the planet. But honestly, that's just where his story begins." (Pay version link) Texas Monthly. December 1, 2004. Printed in the December 2004 issue. Retrieved 2011-04-05.
- ^ "Norman Mailer, Playboy lose boxer's suit." The Baltimore Sun. November 17, 1977. A3. Retrieved 2011-04-05. "[...]to a south Texas boxer who had filed a $1 million libel suit against them. The jury ruled yesterday that $100,000 must be paid to Elmo Henderson by Play[...]"
- ^ Guernsey, Otis L. "Curtain Times: The New York Theater 1965–1987". Applause 1987. Play review page 78.
- ^ "Pro-Castro Organization Now Defunct" United Press International. December 29, 1963.
- ^ “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” January 30, 1968 New York Post
- ^ a b c "The Guest From Hell: Savoring Norman Mailer's legendary appearance on The Dick Cavett Show". Slate.com. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2007/08/the_guest_from_hell.single.html. Retrieved April 13, 2012.
- ^ 4-minute YouTube excerpt from show
- ^ Google video titled "Charlie Rose - Dick Cavett, 57 min - Mar 5, 2001."
- ^ Ulin, David L. "Mailer: an ego with an insecure streak." Los Angeles Times. November 11, 2007.
- ^ Kaufman, Michael T. "Literary World Lashes Out After a Week of Hesitation." New York Times. February 22, 1989.
- ^ "Only In America." Commonwealth Club. February 20, 2003.
- ^ "Campaign contributions." Newsmeat.com. Retrieved 2008-01-25.
- ^ Mailer, Norman (November 1971). The Prisoner of Sex. The New American Library: Signet. pp. 18–19. ISBN 70-157475.
- ^ a b c Mailer for Mayor, The Libertarian Forum (May 15, 1969)
- ^ a b c Mailer, John Buffalo (2009-05-24) Summer of '69, The American Conservative
- ^ Posted by fruminator on November 20, 2007 1:04 PM (2007-11-20). "Campaign poster". Frumin.net. http://frumin.net/ation/2007/11/mailer_for_mayor_in_memorium.html. Retrieved 2010-04-06.
- ^ "Norman Mailer Arrested in Stabbing of Wife at a Party", The New York Times, November 22, 1960. Retrieved 2008-04-26.
- ^ "Of Time and the Rebel". Time. December 5, 1960. Retrieved 2008-04-26.
- ^ "Crime and Punishment; Norman Mailer Stabs His Wife At A Party In Their New York Apartment". Entertainment Weekly, November 15, 1991. Retrieved 2008-04-26.
- ^ Millet, Kate. Sexual Politics Virago, 1991. pp. 314–5.
- ^ "Author Norman Mailer dies at 84." BBC. November 10, 2007
- ^ "2005 press release". Hrc.utexas.edu. 2005-04-25. http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases/2005/mailer.html. Retrieved 2010-04-06.
- ^ "Mailer visit to Ransom Center in Texas". Hrc.utexas.edu. http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition/2007/spring/mailer.html. Retrieved 2010-04-06.
- ^ Allyen, Richard. "Mailer's mistress reveals 'real man' in steamy bedroom accounts." Sydney Morning Herald. April 26, 2008
- ^ "Mailer Sex Stories Arrive at Harvard." Harvard Crimson. April 26, 2008.
- ^ The Norman Mailer Center, official website.
- ^ Mailer, Norman (March 1971). "The Prisoner of Sex". Harper’s Magazine. http://www.harpers.org/archive/1971/03/0021207. Retrieved 2009-09-13.
Further reading[link]
- Norman Mailer by Michael K. Glenday. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.
- Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer by Nigel Leigh. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.
- Norman Mailer: Works and Days by J. Michael and Donna P. Lennon. Westport, MA: Sligo Press, 2000. Comprehensive, annotated primary and secondary bibliography with life chronology.
- Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work, edited by Robert F. Lucid. Boston: Little, Brown. The first collection of essays on Mailer.
- Norman Mailer by Philip Bufithis. New York: Ungar, 1978. Perhaps the most readable and reliable study of Mailer's early work.
- Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer by Robert J. Begiebing. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980. Fine discussion of Mailer's "heroic consciousness."
- The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer by Barry H. Leeds. Bainbridge, WA: Pleasure Boat Studio, 2002.
- Political Fiction and the American Self by John Whalen-Bridge. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Subtle examination of Mailer's dual aptitude of representing and resisting American mythologies.
- Critical Essays on Norman Mailer, edited by J.Michael Lennon: Boston, G.K.Hall and Co., 1986.
- Norman Mailer, by Richard Poirier. New York: Viking,1972. One of the best studies of Mailer's writing, tracking his career through the early Eighties.
- Norman Mailer by Richard Jackson Foster. University of Minnesota Press, 1968. Pamphlet.
- The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer by Barry H. Leeds, New York University Press,1969.
- Norman Mailer Revisited by Robert Merrill. Twayne, 1992. Contains perhaps the best analysis of The Executioner's Song
- Mailer: His Life and Times, edited by Peter Manso. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Highly readable, but controversial "oral" biography of Mailer created by cross-cutting interviews with friends, enemies, acquaintances, relatives, wives of Mailer and Mailer himself.
- Conversations with Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1988.
- Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Leo Braudy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Contains useful insights on Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
- Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer by Laura Adams. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1976. Good discussion of early narrators.
- Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis by John W. Aldridge. New York: David McKay, 1966. Contains Aldridge's important essay on An American Dream.
- The Portable Beat Reader, edited by Ann Charters, Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk). Contains "The White Negro."
- The Norman Mailer Review, edited by Phillip Sipiora. New periodical co-sponsored by the University of South Florida and The Norman Mailer Society (www.normanmailersociety.com).
- The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture: Francis Irby Gwaltney http://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=3034
- Van A. Tyson http://www.atkinschronicle.com/vantyson.htm
External links[link]
 |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Norman Mailer |
- The Norman Mailer Center
- The Norman Mailer Society
- Norman Mailer at the Internet Movie Database
- Transcript of interview with Ramona Koval, Edinburgh International Book Festival, August 2000 broadcast on The Book Show, ABC Radio National, November 12, 2007
- "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," article by Norman Mailer on John F. Kennedy, Esquire magazine, November 1960
- Andrew O'Hagan (Summer 2007). "Norman Mailer, The Art of Fiction No. 193". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5775/the-art-of-fiction-no-193-norman-mailer.
- Sunday New York Times review by Lee Siegel of The Castle in the Forest
- Norman Mailer on American Masters (PBS Broadcast)
- Norman Mailer: The American (Documentary)
- Norman Mailer's writing on The Huffington Post
- A conversation with Norman Mailer (Minnesota Public Radio)
- Norman Mailer and Günter Grass interviewed by Andrew O'Hagan at The New York Public Library, June 2007
- Norman Mailer speech at UC Berkeley Vietnam Teach-In, 1965 (RealAudio) (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center)
- Joyce Carol Oates on Norman Mailer
- Booknotes interview with Mailer on Oswald's Tale, June 25, 1995.
- The short film We Are in Love with the Word, Part I (1986) is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
- The short film We Are in Love with the Word, Part II (1986) is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Mailer, Norman |
| Alternative names | Mailer, Norman Kingsley (full name) |
| Short description | Novelist, essayist, journalist, poet, playwright |
| Date of birth | January 31, 1923 |
| Place of birth | Long Branch, New Jersey, United States |
| Date of death | November 10, 2007 |
| Place of death | New York City, New York, United States |
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