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Mailer: His Life and Times Paperback – November 18, 2008

by Peter Manso (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars 7 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 768 pages
  • Publisher: Washington Square Press; Reprint edition (November 18, 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1416562869
  • ISBN-13: 978-1416562863
  • Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.8 x 9.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,058,060 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsAlas, Poor Manso
By Christopher Busa on December 23, 2008
Format: Paperback
I read Manso's oral biography when it first came out in 1985, smitten by the matrix of competing testimony that somehow balanced out the extremes, and made Mailer seem alive, animated with ambiguity, endearing in his flaws, and audacious in his ambition. Now, in this new edition, Manso has added an afterword, detailing the breakup of their friendship and working partnership. He has lost all sight of Mailer as a subject of biography. In sixty pages of unfocused anger, he attacks the very people who were crucial to Mailer's life since Manso's account ended. He gives us a picture of the great author as a desearate to keep his name before the public with a series of what Manso calls "non-books," ignoring the accomplisments of key books written after their breakup, including Gospel According to the Son and the Castle in the Forest. He badmouths Mailer's biography of Picasso as a plagiarism of John Richardson. His screed is especially mean-spirited toward the very people Mailer drew around him in his last years: Larry Schiller, J. M. Lennon, and his wife Norris. Toward Norris, he is most poisonous, willfully distorted each positive attribute into a hideous caricature. I felt a flush of shame pass across my face, shame that Manso should fall so low as to rage against the man he so admired. In the afterword, Manso also belittles Provincetown Arts, the magazine I edit, saying that I rejected an excerpt for his 2002 book "Ptown: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape." Indeed, I did, but not, as Manso said, because I wanted to make cuts unacceptable to him, but rather because Manso came over to my house and demanded that I put his name in a banner across the logo on the magazine's cover, saying that Vanity Fair did so when his Brando book came out. The cover feature that year was Sebastian Junger, author of the Perfect Storm, and Manso said, "I'm as famous as Junger--I want equal billing!" Mailer's egotism posseses charm, Manso's arid self subsists on its own festering bile.
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3.0 out of 5 stars"The Great Mythomaniac"
By Franklin the Mouse on September 10, 2015
Format: Paperback
Why does Mailer get so much attention? It's the question that has been bouncing around in my head since the 1990s. 'The Naked and the Dead' was a good book, but there are plenty of authors who write wonderful works that get nowhere near the attention Mr. Mailer seemed to attract. Most authors are solitary types, but not Mailer the publicity junkie/alcoholic. His run for New York City mayor, multiple wives and children, countless extramarital affairs, and the mess involving murderer Jack Henry Abbott made him look more like an unhinged narcissist than one of the so-called great 20th-Century authors. I was hoping Mr. Manso's oral biography would help answer my question.

Mr. Manso's approach of printing excerpts from various people who knew Mr. Mailer makes for a casual read as if you're in a room listening to people reminiscing. Most of interviewees come across as pompous and their recollections of past events do sometimes contradict other witnesses to a Mailer event. It's impossible to know if they remember events incorrectly, are lying to make themselves look good, or both. The author lets the people have their say with it being up to the reader to make the call. There's no argument that Mr. Mailer was very smart, but as one of his "friends" describes, the Brooklyn-born writer was "fiercely competitive, energetic, and ambitious..." The way the people describe the stuff Mailer did, it sure looks that way. From what I could surmise, being welcomed into and constantly schmoozing with New York City's snobby, self-important hierarchy of the literary world was an important component if you wanted to be recognized as a "serious" author (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean).Read more ›
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2.0 out of 5 starsNotes of a Displeased Groupie
By Ted Burke on March 1, 2009
Format: Paperback
Author Peter Manso published a highly readable oral history of his then-hero and mentor Norman Mailer in the '80's titled " Mailer: His Life and Times". Manso, a good writer in all other respects, has republished the book with a lengthy afterword in which he repays the insult Mailer had paid him when it turned out the biography displeased him greatly. Mailer and Manso were close friends during the eighties, with Manso admitting as much that he was , more or less, Mailer's acolyte. The pair even shared a beach front house in Provincetown , Rhode Island. Mailer had written to the local paper ""P.D. Manso is looking for gold in the desert of his arid inner life, where lies and distortions are the only cactus juice to keep him going." Ouch, that hurts. But what puzzles me is that Peter Manso has seemingly nurtured the hurt for over thirty years and now takes a few too many pages to give his account, share gossip, insult Mailer friends. The aggrieved author seems less a wounded innocent than a gold digger . The lesson, I suppose, is that one ought not live with their heroes. I'd agree that Manso's Mailer biography is a fascinating read as far as it goes; it's hard to go astray when you've a group of interesting people giving an intimate account of a singularly intriguing and often brilliant personality like Mailer. But based on this, Manso's introduction to the new edition just sounds like sour grape he wants everyone to take a sip from. The problem with having heroes who embody every virtue and ambition one wants to cultivate for their own is that heroes will betray you, intentionally or otherwise.Read more ›
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