Of a Fire on the Moon
  • Published: 15 June 2014
  • ISBN: 9780553390612
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $45.00

Of a Fire on the Moon

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Available for the first time in a gorgeous Random House Trade Paperbacks edition.

For many, the moon landing was the defining event of the twentieth century. So it seems only fitting that Norman Mailer—the literary provocateur who altered the landscape of American nonfiction—wrote the most wide-ranging, far-seeing chronicle of the Apollo 11 mission. A classic chronicle of America’s reach for greatness in the midst of the Cold War, Of a Fire on the Moon compiles the reportage Mailer published between 1969 and 1970 in Life magazine: gripping firsthand dispatches from inside NASA’s clandestine operations in Houston and Cape Kennedy; technical insights into the magnitude of their awe-inspiring feat; and prescient meditations that place the event in human context as only Mailer could.
 
Praise for Of a Fire on the Moon
 
“The gift of a genius . . . a twentieth-century American epic—a Moby Dick of space.”—New York
 
“Mailer’s account of Apollo 11 stands as a stunning image of human energy and purposefulness. . . . It is an act of revelation—the only verbal deed to be worthy of the dream and the reality it celebrates.”—Saturday Review
 
“A wild and dazzling book.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Still the most challenging and stimulating account of [the] mission to appear in print.”—The Washington Post
 
Praise for Norman Mailer
 
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”—The New York Times
 
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”—The New Yorker
 
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”—The Washington Post
 
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life
 
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”—The New York Review of Books
 
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”—Chicago Tribune
 
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”—The Cincinnati Post
  • Published: 15 June 2014
  • ISBN: 9780553390612
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $45.00
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About the author

Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer was born in New Jersey in January 1923 and after graduating from Harvard, served in the US army from 1944-1946. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published to immediate critical acclaim in 1948 - and has been hailed as 'the best war novel to emerge from the United States' (Anthony Burgess).

He has subsequently published both fiction and non-fiction and his books include Barbary Shore (1951), Advertisements for Myself (1959), The Presidential Papers (1963), An American Dream (1964), Armies of the Night (1968), Ancient Evenings (1983), and Tough Guys Don't Dance (1983).

The Executioner's Song, first published in 1979, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 - an award which Mailer has won twice during his writing career.

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and went to Harvard when he was sixteen. He majored in engineering, but it was while he was at university that he became interested in writing; he published his first story when he was eighteen. After graduating he served during the war in the Philippines with the Twelfth Armoured Cavalry regiment from Texas; those were the years that formed The Naked and the Dead (1948). His other books include Barbary Shore (1951), The Deer Park (1955), Advertisements for Myself (1959), Deaths for the Ladies, a volume of poetry (1962), The Presidential Papers (1963), An American Dream (1964), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), The Armies of the Night (1968), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), A Fire on the Moon (1970), The Prisoner of Sex (1971), Marilyn (1973), Some Honourable Men (1976), Genius and Lust - A Journey Through the Writings of Henry Miller (1976), A Transit to Narcissus (1978), The Executioner's Song (1979) and Tough Guys Don't Dance (1983). The Deer Park has been adapted into a play and was successfully profuced off Broadway. He also directed four films.

In 1955 Norman Mailer co-founded the Village Voice, and he was the editor of Dissent from 1952 until 1963. For his part in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam he was gaoled in 1967. He was President of PEN (US chapter) from 1984 to 1986 and was winner of the National Book Award for Arts and Letters in 1969 and of the Pulitzer Prize twice, once in 1969 and again in 1980.

Norman Mailer was married six times and had nine children. He died in November 2007.

Also by Norman Mailer

Advertisements for Myself
The Armies of the Night
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
The Naked and the Dead
Norman Mailer: The Sixties
Why Are We in Vietnam?
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
See all

Praise for Of a Fire on the Moon

  • "A wild and dazzling book."--The New York Review of Books
  • "A twentieth-century American epic--a Moby Dick of space . . . Mailer has given flesh and soul to the voyage of a 'ball of ash' and has pierced the most unknown and under-interprested of events. It is the gift of a genius."--New York
  • "Norman Mailer's account of Apollo 11 stands as a stunning image of human energy and purposefulness. . . . It is an act of revelation--the only verbal deed to be worthy of the dream and the reality it celebrates."--Saturday Review
  • "Forty years on, and with many re-readings, I still cannot get through [Mailer's] descriptions of Saturn-Apollo without a gulp . . . An on he goes, delivering pages of sudden, bursting generosity. . . . Mailer has the confidence, the talent and the enthusiasm to break the rules, to pile on the words and imagery, and get away with it."--The Guardian
  • "The Apollo programme was an immense story worthy of Mailer's famed prose. And what prose it is. . . . Cold technology would not always prevail, but, it did for a while, and Mailer's book charts it breathlessly, dramatically."--Spike Magazine


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