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Norman Mailer's "novel biography" of Marilyn Monroe remains a classic and--to my mind--one of the only "must have" bios on the star. Worth the price of admission for the gorgeous photos alone (most of them exclusive to this book and not to be seen elsewhere), it's just the most literary and artful examination of its subject yet to be found. Even today, with literally hundreds of books on Marilyn available (many of them beautifully illustrated and well-written), Mailer's prose--literary and poetic--leaves his competitors in the dust, their bios encyclopedic by comparison. What's different about Norman's approach is his attempt to get inside her mind, and to try and trace the problems that plagued her as an adult back to their origins in her childhood. He practically creates a language of his own for her psychic interior world that literally changed the way I think about speaking, writing and critical analysis. Some of his phrases are so striking that I remember them by heart. (Ex: "A void in one's sense of identity is equal to a mental swamp where insane growths begin.")
Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor and political activist. His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948. His best-known work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, which was published in 1979, and for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, his book Armies of the Night was awarded the National Book Award.
Along with Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which uses the style and devices of literary fiction in fact-based journalism.
Mailer was also known for his essays, the most renowned of which was "The White Negro." He was a cultural commentator and critic, expressing his views through his novels, journalism, essays and frequent media appearances.
In 1955, Mailer and four others founded The Village Voice, an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village