A Hundred Years of Norman Mailer

In 1971, when J. Michael Lennon was a graduate student writing his PhD thesis on Norman Mailer, he began a correspondence with his literary hero. It was the start of a lifelong relationship that led to Lennon becoming Mailer’s archivist, biographer, editor, collaborator, and close friend. That relationship is at the center of Mailer’s Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature, a combination of memoir and literary criticism which charts what Lennon calls, “the rising action of my life in literature.”

Lennon’s book weaves together his career in academia—he is now an Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University—with recollections of his rather idyllic childhood in Massachusetts, as part of a large Irish Catholic clan, many of whom worked in the local  textile mills. So we meet Lennon’s beloved grandmother and her pet crow Martha; his mother, a voracious reader and reciter of W.B. Yeats and Gerald Manley Hopkins; and his father, a highly intelligent and frustrated blue-collar polymath with an impressive knowledge of music, as well as the works of F. Scott, , and . We also learn how Lennon solved the mystery of his grandfather’s disappearance, a closely guarded family secret because, as he puts it, “the Irish know how to bury things.”