The Executioner's Song (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Norman Mailer
- First Published: 1979
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, New Journalism
- Subjects: 1970’s, North America or North Americans, United States or Americans, Prisoners, Murder or homicide, Capital punishment, California, West, U.S., Robbery or robbers, Southwest, Pacific Northwest, Biography
- Locales: California, Oregon, Utah
The Executioner's Song appeared at a time when critics (and Mailer himself) had become tired of the way his personality tended to dominate everything he wrote. He wanted to find a subject that would be bigger than his ego and that would force him to write in a different style. Presented with a massive amount of material by Larry Schiller, who had bought the rights to Gilmore's story, Mailer found that he had hundreds of characters to work with, speaking on tape and in documents that amounted to a massive social novel which would ultimately cover virtually every region in the...
[The entire page is 850 words long]
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