Norman Mailer Interview with Don Swaim

Audio Interview with Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and author of An American Dream, Ancient Evenings, The Executioner's Song, The Naked and the Dead, and more talks with Don Swaim in 1991 about his most recent novel at the time of the interview, Harlot's Ghost, which is about the CIA during the Cold War.

He spent seven long years writing this book because of all the research entailed. The story is fiction, but Mailer wanted to make it historically accurate. Based on his research, he critiques the way the United States portrayed the USSR during the Cold War as our worst enemy. During his travels there, he realized they were just a third-world country with no capacity to fight the United States.

He also spoke with Swaim about his life as a writer. He keeps busy, a characteristic he learned from his mother but also out of necessity. Mailer is a father of nine children.

When he develops his characters, they must be real to him for it to work well. He also must write in the same place every day. He says writing is such a difficult task that he can’t take readjusting himself to a new environment.

To hear more from Mailer, click on the link below.

Listen to the Norman Mailer interview with Don Swaim, 1991
(56 min. 04 sec.)

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For over a decade, many of the best writers of the English language found their way onto Don Swaim's daily two-minute CBS Radio show, Book Beat. His New York-based program was derived from longer interviews, sometimes 40-minutes in length. Found exclusively here, Wired for Books proudly webcasts these conversations in their entirety using RealAudio.

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