Norman Mailer and the Siege of Chicago: Maureen Corrigan & J. Michael Lennon

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Monday August 27

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6:30 PM  –  8:30 PM

No writer plunged more vigorously into the chaotic energies of the 1960s than Norman Mailer, fearlessly revolutionizing literary norms and genres to capture the decade’s political, social, and sexual explosions. Declaring himself to have “the mind of an outlaw,” he adhered closely to his own vision of what it meant to be a writer. In a way uniquely his own, he merged the public and the private, the personal and the political, taking risks with every sentence. This year, for the first time in a single volume, the Library of America is publishing four of his most extraordinary works.

At AWM to discuss Mailer and his work will be J. Michael Lennon and Maureen Corrigan. Lennon is emeritus professor of English at Wilkes University, is Norman Mailer’s archivist, editor, and authorized biographer, and president of the Norman Mailer Society. His books include Norman Mailer: A Double Life(2013) and Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (2014).

Corrigan is the book critic for NPR's Fresh Air, is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner) and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America.

Corrigan served as a juror for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures was published by Little, Brown in September 2014.

The conversation will be moderated by broadcast journalist Tony Smith of WRXTV. Smith is a board member of the National Association of Black Journalists' Chicago chapter. 

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