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by Norman Mailer
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, a convicted killer becomes the first prisoner to be executed in the United States.
In what is arguably his greatest book, America's most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America's prisons who became notorious for two reasons: first, for robbing two men in 1976, then killing them in cold blood; and, second, after being tried and convicted, for insisting on dying for his crime. To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed paradoxically intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death.
Norman Mailer tells Gilmore's story--and those of the men and women caught up in his procession toward the firing squad--with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscapes and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. The Executioner's Song is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest sources of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement--impossible to put down, impossible to forget.
How has your reading changed as you've gotten older, if at all?
...that struck me as keepers in the past and am reading again to see what had intrigued me about them. Things like Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier and The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski and A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I know when I finish these I will find others on my s...
-Linda_O_donnell
What book or books are you reading this week? (01/09/2025)
Finished a re-read of The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer. The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair which was very different from what I expected, but quite interesting. The English Girl by Daniel Silva, Ord...
-Linda_O_donnell
Which book(s) have you read at least three times as an adult?
Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Probably ten times or more. I buy a new copy from a thrift store every time I re-read so I can't see my previous comments. I read it for the first time in my early 20's and my daughter calls it my bible. So much of what I believe comes from this book that she could b...
-Linda_O_donnell
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This information about The Executioner's Song was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1955, he was one of the co-founders of The Village Voice. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Naked and the Dead; The Armies of the Night, for which he won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; The Executioner's Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize; Harlot's Ghost; Oswald's Tale; The Gospel According to the Son, The Castle and the Forest and On God. He died in 2007.
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