J. Michael Lennon is an American academic and writer who is the Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University and the late Norman Mailer’s archivist and authorized biographer. He published Mailer's official biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life in 2013. He edited Mailer's selected letters in 2014 and the Library of America's two-volume set Norman Mailer: The Sixties in 2018.
Early life
Lennon, a native of Cape Cod, grew up in Somerset, Massachusetts. He graduated from Stonehill College, a Catholic school south of Boston, in 1963 and became a U.S. Navy officer during the Vietnam War. After sea duty on the USS Uvalde for 30 months, he taught military law and history at Naval O.C.S. Newport in the late 1960s. He served five years on active duty (1964-1968).
He first encountered the work on Norman Mailer when he read The Naked and the Dead as a fifteen-year-old: "The language was uninhibited, the sexual descriptions, the descriptions of war. ... It's really an odyssey of suffering." He earned his M.A. (1969) and Ph.D. (1975) in English at the University of Rhode Island, where he began his scholarly work on Mailer in the classes of Dr. Nancy Potter, who directed his dissertation on Mailer's Armies of the Night.
Lennon and Mailer
While working on his dissertation in 1971, Lennon watched Gore Vidal and Mailer's altercation on The Dick Cavett Show. Lennon wrote a letter of support to Mailer who then invited Lennon to hear him speak. Afterward, they met at a bar and began their long friendship and collaboration. Mailer enjoyed the Irish "bravura" and sense of humor, so he took an immediate liking to Lennon.
Lennon and his wife Donna and their sons became friendly with Mailer's family, including all nine children, and his sister Barbara Wasserman and her son Peter Alson, and enjoyed regular visits in the summers. Lennon became Mailer's literary executor in 1981 and proposed a collection of Mailer's essays and interviews which became the 1982 collection, Pieces and Pontifications, which Lennon edited. Mailer would later add: "Sometimes I think Mike Lennon and I were as designed for each other as some species of American Yin and Yang, as hot dogs, perhaps, and mustard. His talents, his discipline, and his ambition form a complement to all the slacks, voids, and indolences of my nature."
In 1988, Lennon edited Conversations with Norman Mailer, a collection of 34 of his interviews and a key source for those writing about Mailer. By this time, Mailer had begun sharing drafts of his books with Lennon, who began assembling a collection of his books, his uncollected reviews, essays, poems and letters to the editor, and everything in print he could find about Mailer.
At Lennon's suggestion, in 1994 the Mailer papers, previously housed in Manhattan, were moved to a large professional storage facility in Pennsylvania. This arrangement made it more convenient for Lennon and Mailer's current biographer and archivist Robert F. Lucid to have access. Lennon and his wife began to re-organize the papers, sifting and sorting through 500 cubic feet of paper. This led to work on a comprehensive annotated listing of Mailer's writings, and those about him. Norman Mailer: Works and Days, compiled by the Lennons, was published in 2000, with a preface from Mailer, and is the standard Mailer bibliography. Three years earlier, Lennon and Lucid assisted Mailer in putting together a mammoth collection of his writings, The Time of Our Time. Mailer's archive found its permanent home at the University of Texas' Harry Ransom Center in 2005. Lennon helped broker this $2.5 million deal.
In 2000, Lennon began the task of reading and selecting Mailer's letters. It took him almost three years to read all 45,000 letters (25 million words), and he remains the only person, save Mailer, who has read them all. Since Mailer was open and frank in his letters, Lennon explains to Sipiora, they became the most important sources for the biography.
In 1997, the Lennons purchased a condo in Provincetown a short walk from the Mailer house, and spent weekends and summers there. The Lennons often played Texas Hold'em with Mailer, enjoying the play, friendly banter, and Jameson's. In Mailer's later years, the Lennon's would become honorary members of the Mailer family.
In 2003, a volume of Mailer's insights on writing, The Spooky Art, was published, edited by Lennon. It contains excerpts from previously published items by Mailer, excerpts from interviews Mailer had given, and fifty original pieces written for the book.