he world has long since finished having its Norman Mailer conversation, but few writers in their day received as much attention. Mailer made himself into a figure about whom everyone felt the need to have a view, and there was a lot to have a view about. Mailer wrote fiction, drama, poetry, biography, journalism, screenplays, newspaper columns, and a “true-life novel.” His first book, “The Naked and the Dead,” came out when he was twenty-five, in 1948, and was a Times No. 1 best-seller for eleven weeks, and he had at least one book on the best-seller list in every decade after that until his death, in 2007.

He won two Pulitzer Prizes—for “The Armies of the Night,” in 1969, and “The Executioner’s Song” (the true-life novel), in 1980. He directed and acted in three underground movies, one of which Pauline Kael called “the worst movie that I’ve stayed to see all the way through.” He produced an Off Broadway play, based on his third novel, “The Deer Park,” which was a flop, and directed a Hollywood feature film, “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” adapted from another of his novels, which managed to break even despite being nominated for Golden Raspberry Awards in seven categories. He appeared often, sometimes raucously, on talk shows and in various public venues. He was interviewed more than seven hundred times, and he wrote forty-five thousand letters.

He had six wives, eight children, and many mistresses, one whom he saw for nearly sixty years, and another who wrote a memoir about their affair and sold her papers to Harvard University. He co-founded the Village Voice, in 1955, but stopped writing for it because it wasn’t outrageous enough. He ran for the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, in 1969, and did not finish last. He was arrested at least four times, and was confined for seventeen days in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue after stabbing his second wife, Adele, and coming within a fraction of an inch of killing her, at a party in their apartment, in 1960. Five years later, he published “An American Dream,” in which the depressed protagonist strangles his wife and throws her body out the window of an East Side apartment building, which makes him feel much better.

In 1981, he supported the parole of a convicted murderer, Jack Abbott, whose prison writings he helped to get published, and who proceeded to kill a waiter six weeks after his release and then fled. “Culture is worth a little risk,” Mailer told reporters after Abbott had been captured. When he wrote to Abbott’s parole board, he had just finished writing “The Executioner’s Song,” about a man not very different from Abbott, Gary Gilmore, who killed two defenseless people three months after being paroled.

His books received some of the best and some of the worst reviews ever published. The word “disaster” appears in more than one. Starting with “Advertisements for Myself,” which came out in 1959, he frequently inserted himself into his work, sometimes in the guise of a fictional alter-ego and sometimes as himself described in the third person. Even when he set a novel, “Ancient Evenings,” in Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs, he planned a sequel in which the protagonist appears three thousand years later reincarnated as Norman Mailer.

He published dyspeptic criticism of his contemporaries, and feuded publicly with several of them, including William Styron and Gore Vidal, and privately with a long list of colleagues and collaborators. He told (bad) dirty jokes on the wrong occasions, drank to excess, picked fights at parties, was unfaithful to all of his wives, and habitually spent more than he took in. To raise money, he once charged admission to his own birthday party.

People came. Most people who knew Mailer really liked him. He was a narcissist with a hundred friends. He could be boorish, petty, and cold, but mostly he was gracious, generous, and bemused. He had a twinkle. He was deeply defended and perpetually on display at the same time, the very definition of vulnerability. As Jonathan Lethem, an admirer, recently put it, he is “the perfect example of the kind of writer we’re defiantly hopeful not to suffer in our midst anymore . . . the paradigm for a novelist’s willful abuse of his credibility with readers, and a White Elephant par excellence.”

J. Michael Lennon’s “Norman Mailer: A Double Life” (Simon & Schuster) is the fifth life of Mailer so far. The author has a major stake in Mailer’s reputation. He met Mailer in 1972, worked with him on many projects, and is his authorized biographer and the president of the Norman Mailer Society.

Lennon also helped to assemble Mailer’s papers, now housed at the University of Texas in Austin, and he quotes from Mailer’s letters approximately seven hundred times. The letters are Mailer at his best. He is (usually) witty, sweet, and self-aware. (Mailer wrote more than a few kiss-off letters, too. These are not so sweet.) After the nineteen-fifties, Mailer dictated most of his letters, but they still have the baroque flavor of the published prose—the startling conceits, the ingenious syntax, and the mordant humor—minus a lot of the bombast. It’s astonishing that there are forty-five thousand of them. That’s four times the number of extant Henry James letters.

Mailer’s life is a pasture fairly well plowed, and a lot of Lennon’s story is familiar, though he adds many details and corrects some canards. He is especially good on the late, lion-in-winter years: on Mailer’s sixth, and longest, marriage, to Norris Church; on his relationship with their son, John Buffalo; and on his struggles with the final works, more fantastically ambitious than ever—the God book (“God: An Uncommon Conversation,” of which Lennon is co-author), the Jesus book (“The Gospel According to the Son”), and the Hitler book (“The Castle in the Forest”).

There is something comic and stirring, something Falstaffian, in these pages of the biography, about the stubborn refusal to give it up, any of it. During a visit to San Francisco on a book tour for “The Castle in the Forest,” at the age of eighty-four, walking with two canes, barely able to read the menu, he propositions his oldest mistress. (She tells him she would only fall asleep; he agrees, and gets her a cab.) Mailer expected too much from life, but that is much better than expecting too little.

The consensus verdict on Mailer’s work was reached almost fifty years ago. It is that he wrote nonfiction like a novelist, sometimes a great one, and fiction like someone who was trying to write something else—the psychoanalysis of the American mind, or the secret history of the Cold War, or the “Das Kapital” of sex. Fiction wasn’t a congenial form. He had too much to say.

Mailer’s nonfiction belongs to the New Journalism, the name conferred by Tom Wolfe on the style of magazine writing that flourished in the nineteen-sixties. Mailer believed that, as he put it, “not the techniques but the world of fiction” could be brought to the facts of journalism. “If you put the facts together in such a way that they truly breathe for the reader, then you’re writing fiction,” he said near the end of his life. “Something can be true and still be fiction.”

His most important innovation as a journalist was the reporter as character, the practice of treating himself as a participant in the events he was covering. He said that he came up with the idea while he was editing his movies: he realized that Mailer the director was treating Mailer the actor in the third person—asking himself things like, What would Mailer do now?

He inaugurated the technique in “The Armies of the Night,” a book that grew out of a story for Harper’s about the 1967 antiwar March on the Pentagon. He used it again in 1971, in “Of a Fire on the Moon,” about the Apollo 11 mission, and in 1975, in “The Fight,” about the Rumble in the Jungle, the heavyweight title bout in which Muhammad Ali upset George Foreman, in Zaire. He used it in “The Executioner’s Song,” too, although in that book the reporter-character is Mailer’s collaborator, Lawrence Schiller, the man who secured the rights and conducted most of the interviews before Mailer joined the project.

Mailer thought that the device exposed the fly-on-the-wall fallacy of conventional journalism. “I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time,” he said. He made the way in which events are reported part of what is reported.

But he found it hard to make things up. This was a source of endless frustration, since he thought that novel-writing was the higher calling. “I loved journalism,” he once admitted to Lennon, “because it gave me what I’d always been weakest in—exactly that, the story. Then I discovered that this was the horror of it. Audiences liked it better.”

The scale and multiple agendas of Mailer’s novels led him into formal difficulties—notably prolixity, characters who function as mouthpieces, and a painful inability to reach closure. After “Why Are We in Vietnam?,” published in 1967, which is really a long story, modelled on Faulkner’s “The Bear,” his novels tended toward grandiosity and incompletion. “Ancient Evenings,” which took him twelve years to write, and which came out in 1983, was intended to be the first novel in a trilogy. So was “The Castle in the Forest”; the next volume was to take up the story of Rasputin. “Harlot’s Ghost,” almost thirteen hundred pages, published in 1991, ends with the words “To be continued.”

Lennon suggests that these schemes were just Mailer’s way of firing himself up. But they support the impression that Mailer was trying to do with his fiction something that fiction is not good for. Though he regretted calling “The Executioner’s Song” a true-life novel, that is essentially what it is, a work of literature made out of the lives of actual people, and its imaginatively achieved realism is why many readers have felt that it’s the best thing he ever did. “It’s the first book I’ve written without a clear sense of what I thought and what I wanted to teach others,” he wrote to Abbott after it was finished. Precisely.

The verdict on the man is trickier, because the critical decorum that observes a boundary between the work and the person who wrote it doesn’t apply in Mailer’s case. The person was part of the literary proffer. Mailer ran for mayor of New York, proposed himself to the Kennedy Administration as a mediator on civil rights, and considered running in the Democratic Presidential primaries against Bill Clinton. He wanted to be a writer and a tribune at the same time. André Malraux, who wrote the hugely popular novels “Man’s Hope” and “Man’s Fate” in the nineteen-thirties and then served as a minister in two de Gaulle governments, was one of his models.

But the persona was inorganic. It was the product of years of earnest study. Mailer believed in instinct, but being instinctual didn’t come all that instinctively to him. “The little pisherke with the big ideas,” his first wife’s mother called him—and that’s just what he didn’t want to be. He was an intellectual who taught himself to discount the intellect.

Growing up, Mailer was a good boy, much doted upon, and an excellent student. He was reared in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. His father, Barney, was a South African émigré, a dapper gentleman and a compulsive gambler, who worked as an accountant. His mother, Fanny, née Schneider, was the daughter of a rabbi, did not suffer fools, and ran a small oil service and delivery firm set up by Barney’s brother-in-law to keep the family solvent.

Mailer entered Harvard at sixteen, and majored in engineering. (He briefly had an ambition to design airplanes.) In his freshman year, he read John Steinbeck, James T. Farrell, and John Dos Passos, and realized that you could write novels about the kind of life you lived. He had found his vocation. He thought that “Anna Karenina” was the greatest novel ever written.

He met his first wife, Beatrice (Bea) Silverman, at a concert. She was a student at Boston University, and more politically sophisticated and sexually experienced than he was. Mailer graduated in 1943, and they married the following year. Soon afterward, he was drafted.

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Mailer chose to be drafted, rather than enlist in an officer-training program, because he wanted to gather material for a great war novel. He didn’t want to sit behind a desk. “The Naked and the Dead” is based on stories he heard from the men in the 112th Cavalry Regiment, a seasoned National Guard unit out of Fort Bliss, Texas, in which he served as a private in the Pacific Theatre. When he got back, after seventeen months overseas, he devoted himself to the task of producing the novel, rereading pages of “Anna Karenina” for inspiration. He submitted the manuscript in 1947, and then he and Bea, who had been an officer in the Waves, went to Paris for a year, taking classes on the G.I. Bill. They were in Europe when “The Naked and the Dead” came out, in May, 1948.

It was there that Mailer’s self-improvement regimen began. He socialized mainly with other Americans, but he travelled in France, Italy, Spain, and England, and became aware (possibly stimulated by Bea) of a looming postwar struggle between socialism and capitalism. When he got back to the United States, he began telling people that “The Naked and the Dead” should be read as a warning that the United States was preparing to go to war against the Soviet Union. This was, as he conceded to an interviewer, a retrospective interpretation: “I was just sitting in my room in Brooklyn, writing. All I knew was what I read in the newspapers.” But now he became some kind of socialist.

Mailer told part of the story of his literary and intellectual development over the next ten years in “Advertisements for Myself,” a collection of fiction and nonfiction pieces threaded together by commentary—a genre that he essentially invented and that he used several times in his career. A lot of the commentary has to do with the cravenness and duplicity of book publishers—fallout from Mailer’s experiences with his second and third novels, “Barbary Shore,” a political novel published in 1951, and “The Deer Park,” which came out in 1955, and is about Hollywood.

The novels got plenty of critical attention, but most of it was the bad kind. Mailer had trouble getting “The Deer Park” published at all, in part because of concerns about a passage describing, very allusively, fellatio. Obscenity had been an issue for the publisher of “The Naked and the Dead” as well. Mailer cared about obscenity. He hated books that prettified the stuff of ordinary life and speech, that rendered “motherfucking” as “motherloving.” But he was trying to honor that ideal at a time before the string of court cases—over “Howl,” “Tropic of Cancer,” “Naked Lunch,” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”—that changed the legal definition of obscenity and, with it, the publishing industry itself.

On the intellectual side, Mailer spent the decade putting together a personal theory of the cosmos that he remained committed to for the rest of his life. “Maybe I’m bragging,” he said in an interview in 1980, “but I think I have a coherent philosophy. I believe we could start talking about virtually anything, and before we were done I could connect our subject to almost anything in my universe.” That philosophy dates to the nineteen-fifties.

Mailer had several tutors: Jean Malaquais, a former Trotskyist whom he met in Paris; a Baltimore psychiatrist named Robert Lindner; and the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Malaquais believed that there was little to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union—that both were systems of state capitalism, dehumanizing bureaucracies, totalitarianisms of the spirit. Mailer thought that the United States wasn’t totalitarian yet, but that it might be headed that way, that it was always in danger of slipping into fascism.

Lindner, in “Prescription for Rebellion,” published in 1952, argued that psychology was an instrument of social adjustment, leading to “the breeding of a weak race of men who will live and die in slavery, the meek and unprotesting tools of their self-appointed masters.” The antidote was rebellion. “By nature, man is a rebel,” Lindner wrote. “He, man, can deny or suppress this instinct, but only at the expense of his manhood.” This became the grounds for Mailer’s embrace of instinct.

Mailer and Reich never met (Reich died, in federal prison, in 1957), but Mailer constructed his own version of Reich’s signature invention, the orgone accumulator: a box, in which the adept sits, that is supposed to attract something Reich called orgone radiation—a mysterious life force that, among other benefits, can cure cancer. Reich believed that cancer and mental illness are caused by sexual repression. “Psychic health depends upon orgasmic potency,” he wrote, in “The Function of the Orgasm,” published in English in 1942. “In the case of orgastic impotence, from which a vast majority of humans are suffering, biological energy is dammed up, thus becoming a source of all kinds of irrational behavior.”