6.8 /10 1 Votes
3.8/5 Goodreads Language English Originally published 1973 Genre Non-fiction Followed by The Fight | 3/5 Barnes & Noble Country United States Pages 272 pages Subject Biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ISBN 978-0448010298 (hardcover) Preceded by St. George and the Godfather Similar Works by Norman Mailer, Other books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Norman Mailer's 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe (usually designated Marilyn: A Biography) was a large-format book of glamor photographs of Monroe for which Mailer supplied the text. Originally hired to write an introduction by Lawrence Schiller, who put the book package together, Mailer expanded the introduction into a long essay.
The book was particularly controversial. The book's final chapter states that Monroe was murdered by agents of the FBI and CIA who resented her supposed affair with Robert F. Kennedy. In his own 1987 autobiography Timebends, the playwright Arthur Miller, a former husband to Monroe, wrote scathingly of Mailer: "[Mailer] was himself in drag, acting out his own Hollywood fantasies of fame and sex unlimited and power."
Reception
Critical reception was mixed. While the photographs were praised, critics gave Mailer's text a critical drubbing, particularly his then-novel assertion that government agents murdered Monroe, an assertion later became a staple of many subsequent Monroe biographies.
In a 60 Minutes interview broadcast on 13 July 1973, Mailer asked his interlocutor Mike Wallace if he gave his thesis about Monroe's "murder" any credence. Wallace said he did not. Mailer admitted to Wallace that he wrote the book for money and that the Kennedy murder scenario made the book more salable.
The book was also enormously successful, selling more copies than any of his works except The Naked and the Dead. It remained in print for decades, but was out of print in the United States as of 2011.
Two later works that Mailer co-wrote presented imagined words and thoughts in Monroe's voice: the 1980 book Of Women and Their Elegance and the 1986 play Strawhead, which was produced off Broadway starring his daughter Kate Mailer.