Politics, war, sex, boxing, and the art of writing: an era's most controversial writer at his slashing and provocative best The electric and fearless essays of Norman Mailer were essential to the intellectual climate of 1960s America. Here, gathered into one volume for the first time by acclaimed Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon, are all the essential essays from the classic collections The Presidential Papers (1963), Cannibals and Christians (1966), and Existential Errands (1972), each a fascinating window on one of the most extraordinary and tumultuous decades in the nation's history. A self-appointed exorcist of the culture's demons and an unrestrained mythologizer of his own identity, Mailer contemplated and often skewered icons of politics and literature, charted psychosexual undercurrents and covert power plays, and gloried in the exercise of a pugnacious prose style that was all his own. Whether writing about Jackie Kennedy or Sonny Liston, the realist tradition in America or the internal culture wars of the Republican Party, the death of Ernest Hemingway or the battle against censorship, Mailer was always ready to intervene in what he called "the years of the plague." LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

“It is impossible to walk away from this novel without being sharply reminded of the fact that Norman Mailer is a writer of extraordinary ability.”—Chicago Tribune Featuring a new foreword by Mailer scholar Maggie McKinley Published nearly twenty years after Norman Mailer’s fiction debut, The Naked and the Dead, this acclaimed novel further solidified the author’s stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Ranald “D. J.” Jethroe, Texas’s most precocious teenager, recounts a brutal hunting trip he took to Alaska—in a story of fathers and sons, myth and masculinity, character and corruption. Both entertaining and profound, Why Are We in Vietnam? is an exceptional, timeless work awaiting discovery by a new generation of readers. Praise for Why Are We in Vietnam? “A book of great integrity. All the old qualities are here: Mailer’s remarkable feeling for the sensory event, the detail, ‘the way it was,’ his power and energy.”—The New York Review of Books “A tour de force, a treatise on human nature.”—The Dallas Morning News “A brilliant piece of writing.”—Newsweek “Original, courageous, and provocative.”—The New York Times

Together for the first time: two masterworks on the undercurrents of the American mind by one of our greatest historians Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics are two essential works that lay bare the worrying trends of irrationalism, demagoguery, destructive populism, and conspiratorial thinking that have long influenced American politics and culture. Whether underground or--as in our present moment--out in the open, these currents of resentment, suspicion, and conspiratorial delusion received their authoritative treatment from Hofstadter, among the greatest of twentieth-century American historians, at a time when many public intellectuals and scholars did not take them seriously enough. These two masterworks are joined here by Sean Wilentz's selection of Hofstadter's most trenchant uncollected writings of the postwar period: discussions of the Constitution's framers, the personality and legacy of FDR, higher education and its discontents, the relationship of fundamentalism to right-wing politics, and the advent of the modern conservative movement.

A brilliant inquiry into the origins of human nature from the author of Rationality, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Enlightenment Now. "Sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, and fun to read..also highly persuasive." --Time Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Updated with a new afterword One of the world's leading experts on language and the mind explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits-a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century-denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts. Injecting calm and rationality into debates that are notorious for ax-grinding and mud-slinging, Pinker shows the importance of an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense.

Norman Mailer's pro-JFK profile and seminal New Journalism showpiece "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," originally published in Esquire in 1960, now rediscovered in photo book form. Alongside the complete Mailer portrait of JFK as the "existential hero," see Kennedy's campaign and personal life captured by such photojournalistic greats as...

It is a rare and remarkable book that provides a forum for actors to discuss, in their own words, their experiences, their craft, and the creative process that makes and informs a brilliant performance. This book of original interviews is just such a treasure.