The other night Bronwyn and I watched the latest version of Herman Wouk's play "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial", which is streaming on Neon at present. The movie is poignant for a number of reasons. It's one of the great Lance Reddick's final screen performances. It's also director William Friedkin's last film, released two months before his death.
Friedkin is, of course, better known for directing The Exorcist (1973) - as well as The French Connection (1971), for which he won a best director Oscar; Reddick for his work in The Wire and the John Wick franchise. Both men's professionalism and versatility are strongly on display in this gripping courtroom drama.
But the focus wasn't really on them. It was on Kiefer Sutherland, as he did his best to emulate Humphrey Bogart's fabled performance as the paranoid Captain Queeg. Who can ever forget those little steel balls clicking in Bogie's hands as he recited the saga of the missing strawberries and the forged galley key?
Sutherland does a splendid job. He wisely eschews some of Bogart's more memorably mannerisms in favour of a more measured yet equally terrifying fugue on the witness stand. Where the new version couldn't bear comparison with the original film, however, was in the casting of the treacherous Lieutenant Keefer.
Fred MacMurray was so good in this role that he threatened to overshadow the other leads. Lewis Pullman is perfectly adequate in this 2023 remake - of the 1953 stage-play Herman Wouk made out of his Pulitzer-prize winning 1951 novel, rather than of the novel itself, it should be stressed - but he keeps to his place as part of the supporting cast.
What struck me most about the new film, though, was the fact that despite rather awkwardly updating the mutiny from the 1940s to the 2020s, the director chose to retain the details of the war novel Multitudes, Multitudes which Lt. Keefer is supposed to have been working on throughout the events of Wouk's story.
I couldn't find a picture of the book-cake created for Keefer's latest launch party online - it's far more spectacular than this one from a 1981 UK production of the play - but at least the image above gives you some idea of the scene where this measly, treacherous writer is put in his place by the heroic lawyer who's just, very reluctantly, got them all acquitted of mutiny.
So much for the Great War Novel! And the weaselly, sneaky types who write such things ... people like Herman Wouk himself, one is tempted to add. But then, perhaps that's the whole point of his book.
You see, one of the other things I've been doing lately is reading - for the very first time - Norman Mailer's own renowned war novel The Naked and the Dead. There's no denying that it's a gripping piece of work. It doesn't really sound much like the Mailer I know: either such fictions as An American Dream or Ancient Evenings, or 'documentary novels' like The Armies of the Night or The Executioner's Song.
In fact, if I had to come up with an analogy, it would probably be with John Dos Passos. To me, at least, The Naked and the Dead seems distinctly in tune with the quasi-cinematic methods employed by the latter in his USA trilogy: The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932) and The Big Money (1936). Better Dos Passos than Hemingway, one might say. Hemingway's clipped, laconic style was only too fatally attractive to other prose writers of the time.
You do have to give Mailer credit for being one of the first out of the gate when it came to producing the great American WWII novel:
Mailer was inducted into the army in March 1944, less than a year after graduating with honors from Harvard with a B.S. in engineering. His experience in the army as a surveyor in the field artillery, an intelligence clerk in the cavalry and a rifleman with a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippine mountains, gave him the idea for a novel about World War II ...As you can see from the following list of my own top ten picks for best English-language novels about the Second World War, it can take a while to absorb so devastating an experience, let alone transform it into fiction. Here are some of the most prominent examples:
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- 1948 - Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter (1948)
Is this a "war novel" in the accepted sense? I would certainly say so. Greene wrote two other novels, The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The End of the Affair (1951), set during the London blitz. The unnamed East African setting for The Heart of the Matter was later confirmed by Greene himself to be Freetown, Sierra Leone, a location very familiar to him, as he'd been posted there by MI6 to take charge of local security in the mid-1940s. Greene's protagonist Scobie's crisis of faith, which eventually leads him to commit suicide, made perfect sense to contemporary audiences preoccupied with the moral issues raised by the German death-camps and the implications of the Atomic bomb.
- 1948 - Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948)
The novel takes a long while to take flight. It isn't, in fact, till the members of the platoon it centres on are sent out to do reconnaissance behind enemy lines that Mailer's more familiar existential issues begin to come into play. Paradoxically, the powerful plotting and stylistic polish of this, his first published novel, created problems for him later on. His next two novels were flops, and it wasn't until the early 1960s that he really began to come into his own as an essayist and chronicler of contemporary American culture.
- 1951 - James Jones: From Here to Eternity (1951)
This was James Jones's first novel, and its immense success both as a novel and as a film overshadowed much of his later work. His subsequent novel The Thin Red Line, based on his personal experience of the Guadalcanal campaign, is arguably his masterpiece. Collectively, they constitute the first two parts of a trilogy:
- From Here to Eternity (1951)
- The Thin Red Line (1962)
- [with Willie Morris] Whistle (1978)
John Keegan nominated The Thin Red Line as, in his opinion, 'one of [the few] novels portraying Second World War combat that could be favorably compared to the best of the literature to arise from the First World War' ... Paul Fussell said that it was 'perhaps the best' American WWII novel.It was filmed by Terrence Malick in 1998. Nothing, of course, can touch the classic status of Fred Zinneman's 1953 movie of From Here to Eternity, but Malick's film is far more ambitious cinematically.
- 1951 - Nicholas Monsarrat: The Cruel Sea (1951)
This book had a huge effect on me when I first read it as a teenager. It seemed a more convincing portrayal of the (so-called) "Battle of the Atlantic" than anything else I'd ever come across: its miseries as well as its occasional triumphs. I still have a soft spot for it.
- 1952-61 - Evelyn Waugh: Sword of Honour (1952-1961)
I suppose Brideshead Revisited would have to be seen as a kind of war novel, too - as was the more directly topical Put Out More Flags. The Sword of Honour trilogy:is probably less spectacularly brilliant than either of those two. Its strength lies rather in the coverage it provides of Waugh's whole war: from the absurdities of Guy Crouchback's Commando training, to the debacle of Crete, and subsequently the fleshpots of Egypt. Is it a great novel? Certainly it's the most ambitious fictional project Waugh ever attempted: a roman-fleuve based directly on his own experience. It is, in my view, indispensible for any real understanding of Britain at war.
- Men at Arms (1952)
- Officers and Gentlemen (1955)
- Unconditional Surrender [aka "The End of the Battle"] (1961)
- 1961 - Errol Brathwaite: An Affair of Men (1961)
I remember that this famous New Zealand novel was greatly in demand by my fellow-students at Secondary School, who passed it from hand to hand like a kind of prose war-comic, full of action and slaughter. It's a much better book than that description would suggest, though, and should definitely be more widely read. Brathwaite's approach to the effects of war on the people of Bougainville is clearly strongly influenced by Graham Greene. Although, as the title suggests, this is an "affair of men" rather than one to do with God, the latter keeps on creeping in as sole arbiter of the action, even so.
- 1961 - Joseph Heller: Catch-22 (1961)
What can one say about Catch-22 after all these years? The recent attempt to straighten it out into chronological sequence for the 2019 TV miniseries underlines a point one scarcely thought needed stressing: that the jumbling up of the narrative is the only thing that makes it bearable. The 1970 film did much better in that respect. Its more repellent aspects, especially the crude sexual imperialism constantly on display among Yossarian and his comrades, was unfortunately the main thing I took from it in my own most recent rereading. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to navigate my way through it again - but surreptitiously sneaking a peek at my grandmother's copy made a strong impression on me in my teens.
- 1969 - Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
This, too, seemed more mannered than I expected when I reread it recently. Is it really the masterpiece I once assumed it to be? It's a great and complex book, but there's an unpleasant irony in the reflection that the historical "facts" Vonnegut relies on in his eye-witness account of the bombing of Dresden are unfortunately mostly taken from the thoroughly unreliable account by David Irving, now completely discredited by Professor Richard Evans in his brilliant account (Lying about Hitler) of the 2000 Irving libel trial. There's something deeply compelling about Vonnegut's overall project, though, nevertheless.
- 1971-78 - Herman Wouk: The Winds of War / War and Remembrance (1971 / 1978)
It does seem a little extraordinary that having so thoroughly satirised the notion of a huge, all-encompassing war novel - Lt. Keefer's Multitudes, Multitudes - in his own The Caine Mutiny (1951), Herman Wouk then sat down and tried to write it himself. Opinions differ on the merits of Wouk's immense, double-volume chronicle. I dutifully slogged through it at the time, but it's hard to see it now without the overlay of the dreadful multi-part TV miniseries it gave rise to. It's longer than anything else in this list - longer than War and Peace, for that matter - but longer and more all-encompassing doesn't always mean better. It does have real merits, though: Wouk is certainly a skilful writer.
- 1973 - Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Is this the war novel to end all war novels, or is the V1 and V2 bombing of London just a frame for a more complex agenda on Pynchon's part? Who can say? No-one else could have conceived such a book, let alone carried it out. It seems an appropriate place to end our investigations, before we plunge into the conceptual abyss of the Vietnam war. I recall my old PhD supervisor, Colin Manlove, solemnly informing me that he considered it the masterpiece of our age. It's important to remind yourself of that as you try to work your way through the novel's immensities - perhaps this is the one which should have been called Multitudes, Multitudes ...
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Mind you, I could have greatly expanded this list if I'd permitted myself to include foreign-language novels about the war.
Hugo Claus's controversial The Sorrow of Belgium, about the unpalatable truths of collaboration in wartime Europe; Günter Grass's ground-breaking The Tin Drum, the first volume in his classic Danzig Trilogy - The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years (1963); Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate (1959), a devastating analysis of Russian society at the time of the battle of Stalingrad; not to mention Väinö Linna's harrowing The Unknown Soldier (1954), about Russia's "Winter War" against Finland, are a few of the titles that immediately spring to mind.
The first three, in particular, are works on a scale and level of ambition that leave most of their English-language competitors in the dust.
Perhaps, in fact, as Paul Fussell argued in his influential book The Great War and Modern Memory, most of the writing on this theme is so influenced by the templates set up by certain classic World War I exemplars, that it's difficult really to see them independently of that overpowering literary tradition.
Let's see. Here are ten of the most famous English-language novels about - or closely concerning - the First World War which might well have had a strong effect on their successors in the field:
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- 1918 - Rebecca West: The Return of the Soldier
"The Return of the Soldier is the debut novel of English novelist Rebecca West, first published in 1918. The novel recounts the return of the shell shocked Captain Chris Baldry from the trenches of the First World War from the perspective of his cousin Jenny. The novel grapples with the soldier's return from World War I with mental trauma and its effects on the family, as well as the light it sheds on their fraught relationships."- Wikipedia: Rebecca West
- 1921 - John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers
"Until Three Soldiers is forgotten and fancy achieves its inevitable victory over fact, no war story can be written in the United States without challenging comparison with it — and no story that is less meticulously true will stand up to it. At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather. It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war; it even changed the recollections of actual veterans of the war. They saw, no doubt, substantially what Dos Passos saw, but it took his bold realism to disentangle their recollections from the prevailing buncombe and sentimentality."
- 1922 - E. E. Cummings: The Enormous Room
"The Enormous Room (The Green-Eyed Stores) is a 1922 autobiographical novel by the poet and novelist E. E. Cummings about his temporary imprisonment in France during World War I ... The title of the book refers to the large room where Cummings slept beside thirty or so other prisoners. However, it also serves as an allegory for Cummings' mind and his memories of the prison – such that when he describes the many residents of his shared cell, they still live in the 'enormous room' of his mind."- Wikipedia: E. E. Cummings
- 1924-26 - R. H. Mottram: The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1924-26)
The Spanish Farm Trilogy:
- The Spanish Farm (1924)
- Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four! (1925)
- The Crime at Vanderlynden's (1926)
"The Spanish Farm ... won the 1924 Hawthornden Prize. In 1927 it was made into a silent film entitled Roses of Picardy ... William Faulkner greatly admired The Spanish Farm trilogy, comparing it with Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage for its insights into the reality of war. The scholar Max Putzel summarised this by stating: "Mottram had given Faulkner an example for dealing with war by indirection, understating or disguising the powerful emotions Crane had boldly undertaken to summon up."- Wikipedia: Ralph Hale Mottram
- 1924-28 - Ford Madox Ford: Parade's End
The Tietjens novels:
- Some Do Not ... (1924)
- No More Parades (1925)
- A Man Could Stand Up — (1926)
- Last Post (1928)
"Parade's End is a tetralogy of novels by the British novelist and poet Ford Madox Ford, first published from 1924 to 1928. The novels chronicle the life of a member of the English gentry before, during and after World War I. The setting is mainly England and the Western Front of the First World War, in which Ford had served as an officer in the Welch Regiment, a life he vividly depicts ... Robie Macauley, in his introduction to the Borzoi edition of 1950, described it as "by no means a simple warning as to what modern warfare is like... [but] something complex and baffling [to many contemporary readers]. There was a love story with no passionate scenes; there were trenches but no battles; there was a tragedy without a denouement" ... In his introduction to the third novel, A Man Could Stand Up--, Ford wrote, "This is what the late war was like: this is how modern fighting of the organized, scientific type affects the mind."- Wikipedia: Parade's End
- 1925 - Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
"The novel has two main narrative lines involving two separate characters (Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith); within each narrative there is a particular time and place in the past that the main characters keep returning to in their minds. For Clarissa, the 'continuous present' (Gertrude Stein's phrase) of her charmed youth at Bourton keeps intruding into her thoughts on this day in London. For Septimus, the 'continuous present' of his time as a soldier during the Great War keeps intruding, especially in the form of Evans, his fallen comrade."- Wikipedia: Mrs Dalloway
- 1926 - William Faulkner: Soldiers' Pay
"The plot of Soldiers' Pay revolves around the return of a wounded aviator home to a small town in Georgia following the conclusion of the First World War. He is escorted by a veteran of the war, as well as a widow whose husband was killed during the conflict. The aviator himself suffered a horrendous head injury, and is left in a state of almost perpetual silence, as well as blindness. Several conflicts revolving around his return include the state of his engagement to his fiancée, the desire of the widow to break the engagement in order to marry the dying aviator herself, and the romantic intrigue surrounding the fiancée who had been less than faithful to the aviator in his absence."- Wikipedia: Soldiers' Pay
- 1928-36 - Siegfried Sassoon: The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston: Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man / Memoirs of an Infantry Officer / Sherston’s Progress (1928, 1930, 1936)
The Sherston Trilogy:Autobiographical Trilogy:
- Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (1928)
- Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930)
- Sherston’s Progress (1936)
Diaries (ed. Rupert Hart-Davis):
- The Old Century and seven more years (1938)
- The Weald of Youth (1942)
- Siegfried's Journey, 1916–1920 (1945)
- Diaries 1915-1918 (1983)
- Diaries 1920-1922 (1981)
- Diaries 1923-1925 (1985)
"The Sherston trilogy is a series of books by the English poet and novelist Siegfried Sassoon ... They are named after the protagonist, George Sherston - a young Englishman of the upper middle-class, living immediately before and during the First World War. The books are, in fact, 'fictionalised autobiography', wherein the only truly fictional things are the names of the characters. Sassoon himself is represented by Sherston. A comparison of the Sherston memoirs to Sassoon's later, undiluted autobiographical trilogy ... shows their strict similarity, and it is generally accepted that all six books constitute a composite portrait of the author, and of his life as a young man. (Sassoon remarked, however, that his alter-ego personified only one-fifth of his actual personality. Unlike his author, Sherston has no poetic inclinations; nor does he deal with homosexuality, which was illegal at the time Sassoon was writing.)"- Wikipedia: Sherston Trilogy
- 1929 - Richard Aldington: Death of a Hero
"Aldington, a veteran of World War I, claimed that his novel was accurate in terms of speech and style. It contained extensive colloquial speech, including profanity, discussion of sexuality and graphic descriptions of the war and of trench life. There was extensive censorship in England and many war novels had been banned or burned as a result. When Aldington first published his novel, he redacted a number of passages to ensure the publication of his book would not be challenged. He insisted that his publishers include a disclaimer in the original printing of the book with the following text:To my astonishment, my publisher informed me that certain words, phrases, sentences, and even passages, are at present taboo in England. I have recorded nothing which I have not observed in human life, said nothing I do not believe to be true. [...] At my request the publishers are removing what they believe would be considered objectionable, and are placing asterisks to show where omissions have been made. [...] In my opinion it is better for the book to appear mutilated than for me to say what I don't believe.""- Wikipedia: Death of a Hero
- 1929 - Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
"A Farewell to Arms is ... set during the Italian campaign of World War I. First published in 1929, it is a first-person account of an American, Frederic Henry, serving as a lieutenant ... in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The novel describes a love affair between the American expatriate and an English nurse, Catherine Barkley. Its publication ensured Hemingway's place as a modern American writer of considerable stature. The book became his first best-seller and has been called "the premier American war novel from [...] World War I."- Wikipedia: A Farewell to Arms
The first thing that I'd note about most of the novels listed above is their tendency to concentrate on the long-term effects of the War rather than the actual details of conflict. That is a subject much more frequently dealt with in non-fiction memoirs of war experience, books such as Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That (1929) or of Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel (1920).
Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia entry on "War Novels", which can otherwise be recommended as a good overview of the subject, discusses Jünger's work as if it were an important example of the genre! Graves's book, too, began as a novel but was subsequently transformed by him into autobiography. It's as if the borders between memoir and fiction had been eroded by the sheer power of the experience.
After all, the two great showpieces of the genre, Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869) and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) were written long after the battles they recorded, by authors who'd hadn't experienced them first-hand. Tolstoy, it's true to say, had served at the Siege of Sebastopol during the Crimean War, which certainly gave him a certain edge in his descriptions of war. Crane had only read about it in books, however. He didn't even observe it from afar, as a war correspondent in the Spanish-American war in Cuba, until after the completion of his novel.
The real problem with the novels listed above, though, is how little collective influence they had. Once again, though to a much greater extent this time, all the action was elsewhere. All the really influential First World War novels were written in other languages and subsequently translated into English. Here's a very partial list:
- Henri Barbusse: Under Fire: The Story of a Squad (1916)
Barbusse's vital account was actually written and published at the height of the conflict. As a novel, it reads like a foretaste of Erich Maria Remarque's more famous chronicle of trench warfare, but it was able to exert a strong influence over war poets such as Sassoon and Owen at the apex of their creativity. For that reason alone it would demand our attention, but it's also a powerful novel in its own right.
- Jaroslav Hašek: The Good Soldier Švejk (1921-23)
This may be the single greatest and most influential war novel of all time. It's the Don Quixote of the genre. Švejk has cast a long shadow over any subsequent attempts to glorify or idealise the details of warfare. Bert Brecht wrote a sequel, Schweik in the Second World War (1943), but he had little to add to Hašek's immortal original.
- Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
The recent Oscar-winning German film adaptation of Im Westen nichts Neues (2022) - the latest in a long and distinguished line of such movies - made it obvious that its message has still not really got across. Remarque's harrowing anti-war novel was transformed in this new version into a bizarre and sadistic paean to German aggressiveness. The setting was shifted from the beginning to the end of the war, simply (it would seem) to allow for a scene where German soldiers take bloody revenge on the smug allied victors. It was clearly scripted by someone who still believed in the Nazi myth of the "stab in the back" by the (so-called) "November criminals" which cost Germany victory in the war. Hopefully this nonsense will soon sink into oblivion and allow Remarque's gentle, humane novel to be read again as it should be: as a denunciation of the absurdity of war.
- Jules Romains: Verdun (1938)
Jules Romains' immense roman-fleuve Les Hommes de bonne volonté [Men of Good Will] (1932-46) used to be listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest novel ever written. Maybe - maybe not. It all depends on what you call a novel. In any case, two of the volumes, Prélude à Verdun and Verdun, are often printed together as a single account of the battle, the longest and possibly the bloodiest single battle in the entire First World War, if not the whole of European history.
- Arnold Zweig: The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927)
Arnold Zweig (no relation to Stefan) was a German Jewish writer, a pacifist and a socialist. His major work, Der große Krieg der weißen Männer [The Great War of the White Men] (1927-57), a novel-cycle in six parts, includes the following titles:
- Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa [The case of Sergeant Grischa] (1927)
- Junge frau von 1914 [Young woman of 1914] (1931)
- Erziehung vor Verdun [Education before Verdun] (1935)
- Einsetzung eines königs [The crowning of a king] (1937)
- Die Feuerpause [The Ceasefire] (1954)
- Die Zeit ist reif [The time is ripe] (1957)
The first in the series, The case of Sergeant Grischa, is by far the most famous. It's a satire on the bureaucracy which accompanies war, and which preoccupies higher command to the exclusion of mere victory in battle. Education before Verdun was also widely read at the time, as was Zweig's postwar novel The Axe of Wandsbeck (1947):based upon the Altona Bloody Sunday riot which resulted from the march by the Sturmabteilung, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, in Altona on 17 July 1932. The march turned violent and resulted in 18 people being shot dead, including four Communists ... who were beheaded for their alleged involvement in the riot..
I don't know if it's entirely fair of me to feel so suspicious of more contemporary attempts to revisit the landscapes of the two world wars in fiction. But it seems to me at times as if these scenes have become so familiar to us that most writers can whip up an ersatz trench scene or D-day scenario at the drop of a hat.
There are exceptions, however. I did find myself moved by Pat Barker's careful recreations of the world of the Great War poets and conscientious objectors in her Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995).
For the rest, though, these novels continue to pour out in all shapes and sizes, covering as many sides of the conflict as possible. It's becoming as clichéd a subject as the court intrigues of the Tudors, or the murderous ways of the early Roman Emperors ...
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Novels:
- The Naked and the Dead (1948)
- The Naked and the Dead. 1948. London: Allan Wingate (Publishers) Ltd., 1954.
- Barbary Shore (1951)
- Barbary Shore. 1951. Ace Books. London: The New English Library Limited, 1961.
- The Deer Park (1955)
- The Deer Park. 1957. A Corgi Book. London: Transworld Publishers, Ltd., 1967.
- An American Dream (1965)
- An American Dream. 1965. Panther Books Limited. St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1973.
- Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967)
- Why Are We in Vietnam? 1967. London: Panther Books, 1970.
- A Transit to Narcissus (1978)
- Of Women and Their Elegance (1980)
- Ancient Evenings (1983)
- Ancient Evenings. 1983. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1984.
- Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984)
- Tough Guys Don’t Dance. 1984. Panther Books. London: Book Club Associates / Michael Joseph Ltd., 1985.
- Harlot's Ghost (1991)
- Harlot's Ghost. 1991. Michael Joseph. Harmondsworth: The Penguin Group, 1991.
- The Gospel According to the Son (1997)
- The Castle in the Forest (2007)
- The Castle in the Forest: A Novel. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2007.
- The Armies of the Night (1968)
- The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel / The Novel as History. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
- Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (1968)
- Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
- Of a Fire on the Moon (1971)
- A Fire on the Moon. 1970. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1971.
- St. George and The Godfather (1972)
- The Fight (1975)
- The Fight. 1975. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. London: Penguin, 1991.
- The Executioner's Song (1979)
- The Executioner's Song. 1979. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1980.
- Marilyn: A Biography (1973)
- Marilyn: A Biography. Pictures by the World's Foremost Photographers. London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 1973.
- Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography (1995)
- Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (1995)
- Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery. 1995. An Abacus Book. London: Little, Brown and Company (UK), 1996.
- The White Negro (1957)
- Advertisements for Myself (1959)
- Advertisements for Myself. 1959. Panther Books Ltd. London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1972.
- The Presidential Papers (1963)
- The Presidential Papers. 1963. Panther Books Ltd. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1976.
- Cannibals and Christians (1966)
- Cannibals and Christians. 1966. London: Sphere Books Limited, 1969.
- The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer (1967)
- The Idol and the Octopus: Political Writings on the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations (1968)
- King of the Hill: Norman Mailer on the Fight of the Century (1971)
- The Long Patrol: 25 Years of Writing from the Work of Norman Mailer (1971)
- The Prisoner of Sex (1971)
- The Prisoner of Sex. 1971. London: Sphere Books Limited, 1972.
- Existential Errands (1972)
- The Faith of Graffiti (1974)
- Genius and Lust: A Journey through the Major Writings of Henry Miller (1976)
- Some Honorable Men: Political Conventions, 1960-1972 (1976)
- Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots (1980)
- Pieces and Pontifications (1982)
- Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988)
- The Time of Our Time (1998)
- The Time of Our Time. 1998. An Abacus Book. London: Little, Brown and Company (UK), 1999.
- The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing (2003)
- Why Are We At War? (2003)
- The Big Empty (2006)
- On God: An Uncommon Conversation. With J. Michael Lennon (2007)
- The Collision (1933)
- It (1939) [SF]
- The Greatest Thing in the World (1940) [SF]
- Right Shoe on Left Foot (1941)
- Maybe Next Year (1941[) [SF]
- A Calculus at Heaven (1942) [SF]
- Love Buds (1942–43)
- Great in the Hay (1950) [SF]
- The Blood of the Blunt (1951)
- Dr. Bulganoff and the Solitary Teste (1951)
- La Petite Bourgeoise (1951)
- Pierrot [aka "The Patron Saint of MacDougal Alley"] (1951) [SF]
- The Thalian Adventure (1951)
- The Paper House (1951–1952) [SF]
- The Dead Gook (1951–1952) [SF]
- The Language of Men (1951–1952) [SF]
- The Notebook (1951–1952) [SF]
- The Man Who Studied Yoga (1951–1952) [SF]
- Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out (1958) [SF]
- The Time of Her Time (1958) [SF]
- The Killer: a Story (1960) [SF]
- Truth and Being: Nothing and Time (1960) [SF]
- The Last Night: a Story (1962) [SF]
- The Locust Cry (1963) [SF]
- The Shortest Novel of Them All (1963) [SF]
- Ministers of Taste: A Story (1965) [SF]
- The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (1967) [SF]
- The Deer Park: A Play (1967)
- Maidstone: A Mystery (1971)
- Deaths for the Ladies (And Other Disasters) (1962)
- Deaths for the Ladies (and other disasters). New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1962.
- Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings (2003)
- Norman Mailer's Letters on An American Dream, 1963-1969 (2004)
- The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (2014)
- Hilary Mills. Mailer: A Biography. 1982. London: New English Library, 1983.
- Peter Manso. Mailer: His Life and Times (1985)
- J. Michael Lennon. Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013)
- Richard Bradford. Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer (2023)
Non-Fiction Novels:
Biographies:
Essays:
Stories:
Short Story Collections:
Plays and screenplays:
Poetry:
Letters:
Secondary:
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Novels:
- Aurora Dawn (1947)
- City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder (1948)
- The Caine Mutiny (1951)
- Marjorie Morningstar (1955)
- Slattery's Hurricane (1956)
- The "Lomokome" Papers (1956)
- Youngblood Hawke (1962)
- Don't Stop the Carnival (1965)
- The Winds of War (1971)
- War and Remembrance (1978)
- Inside, Outside (1985)
- The Hope (1993)
- The Glory (1994)
- A Hole in Texas (2004)
- The Lawgiver (2012)
- The Man in the Trench Coat (1941)
- The Traitor (1949)
- The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1953)
- Nature's Way (1957)
- This is My God: The Jewish Way of Life (1959)
- The Will to Live On: This is Our Heritage (2000)
- The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion (2010)
- Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year Old Author (2015)
Plays:
Non-fiction:
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