Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. He is considered to have been an innovator of New Journalism, a form of creative nonfiction that weaves autobiography, real events and political commentary into unconventional novels. During his sixty-year career, Mailer wrote more than forty books, winning the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and the National Book Award in 1968 for “The Armies of the Night”. Mailer received a second Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980 for “The Executioner’s Song”, which served as the inspiration for Matthew Barney’s 1999 film “Cremaster 2”, in which Mailer portrayed Harry Houdini. In 2005 Mailer was awarded the National Book Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Mailer worked on “Ancient Evenings” from 1972 to 1983, spending more time writing this book than any other. Set in Egypt between 1290 and 1100 BC and chronicling the lives of its protagonist Menenhetet I, "Ancient Evenings" was declared “an ambitious and daring work of fiction” by one critic, though it received generally negative reviews at the time it was published. Harold Bloom wrote in the “New York Review of Books”: “Mailer’s is too formidable a case of an authentic literary drive to be dismissed, and dismissal is certainly not my intention. “Ancient Evenings” is on the road of excess, and what Karl Kraus said of the theories of Freud may hold for the speculations of Mailer also—it may be that only the craziest parts are true. Mailer probably is aware that his Egyptian obsessions are in the main tradition of American literature, carrying on from much of the imagery of the major writers of the American renaissance.”