This book of essays by Norman Mailer's biographer, Dr. J. Michael Lennon, collect personal and literary reminiscences, insights, and investigations from the last half century. Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon's remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself.

Contents Acknowledgments and Appreciations 13
Prologue: In the "I" of the Storm 19
The Dark Closet: A Fall River Memoir 28
Aunt Nellie and the Bigberry Stadium Incident 39
Altar Boy 46
The Archivist's Apprentice 51
Meeting Mailer 71
Tom Wolfe, Upstart, R.I.P. 79
Mailer's Library 82
Feathered with Forbearance: Shirley Hazzard on Graham Greene 92
Bishop, Pound, and Prospero in Buzzards Bay 97
The Touchdown Twins: James Jones and Norman Mailer 116
With the Goddess of the Night: John Bowers's Memoir 126
Lowney Handy and Her Improbable Writers Colony 130
To Fame from Obscurity: The Letters of James Jones 135
James Jones's World War II Trilogy 141
Gore Vidal, American Iconoclast 148
Gore and Norman in Provincetown 156
Triumph at the Biltmore: John F. Kennedy's Nomination 160
A Meeting of Giants: Ali and Foreman 167
Craftsman of Violence: Muhammad Ali 174
She Is Her Own Most Memorable Character: Joan Didion 179
Motion Slowed into Choreography: Didion Drives South 183
Crafted Confession: Re-reading Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Childhood 188
James Baldwin: Preacher vs. Writer 196
Drenched in Dread: Don DeLillo's Moribundi 203
Dread Persists: DeLillo's Digital Disaster 210
A Mistake 10,000 Miles Long: Robert Stone 214
A Magnificent Keening: Philip Brady 221
Murder, Sex, and the Writing Life: An Interview with Mailer's Biographer by Ronald K. Fried 227
Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian? 237
Mailer's Last Days 254
Fathers and Sons 288