Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007) is considered to be one of the big american voices of literature of the 20th century. Famous for his brutally honest depiction of the second world war in The Naked and the Dead (1948), he interrupts his literary projects time and again to react to current events with journalistic work. For his critical work of chronicling the American circumstances he was awarded the Pulitzer twice, among which The Executioner’s Song inspired Matthew Barney to CREMASTER 2. Mailer took more than 10 years to write Ancient Evenings.

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. Harald Bloom wrote: “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.”