The book, Mailer told Reich’s biographer Christopher Turner many years later, “opened a great deal because to speak personally, I’d been stuck with an itch in my own orgasm. . . . And his notion that the orgasm in a certain sense was the essence of the character, which came out and was expressed in the orgasm, gave me much food for thought over the years.”

If you combine these ideas, and throw in a belief in God and reincarnation, you get the Mailer theory of everything. Mailer thought that God exists but is not completely in control of his creation. He needs us to help him in his struggle with the Devil. How can we help? By acting instinctively and taking risks, on the understanding, as Mailer liked to say, that the best move lies close to the worst. It’s no good choosing a middle path. We have to risk being damned if we hope to save God, preserve our souls for reincarnation, and avoid cancer. The guiding power in all this business is the unconscious, which Mailer thought had “an enormous teleological sense,” and which he named “the navigator.”

Mailer announced the new philosophy, or most of it, in the essay “The White Negro,” which he published in Irving Howe’s journal, Dissent, in 1957. The essay explains that the black man in America lives on the knife edge of physical danger. He lives in the present, “relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body.” The vehicle for this mode of existence is jazz, “the music of orgasm.”

The “white Negro,” also known as “the hipster,” is a white man who has “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro.” He lives by his instincts—not, like his black counterpart, under the threat of the lawman or the lynch mob but in the shadow of the concentration camp and the atomic bomb. Mailer proposed that two teen-agers who beat to death the owner of a candy store are living existentially, since their act puts them into a dangerous relation to the law.

Although Howe later regretted not questioning the passage about the candy-store owner, the editorial board at Dissent accepted Mailer’s essay without debate. Its argument was familiar to the kind of intellectual who wrote for journals like Dissent in the nineteen-fifties. It cobbled together ideas associated with texts that were squarely inside the mid-century canon of European modernism—Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Gide, Camus—along with notions about race that belonged to the white person’s cult of jazz.

Mailer made the essay the centerpiece of “Advertisements for Myself,” in which he proposed himself as the writer-hero of this existentialist vision—and announced a new novel that would take ten years to write and would be “the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters.” Much of what he wrote about afterward got reduced (or inflated) to the inflexible dualism of this homemade cosmology. Nothing was simply good or not so good; it had to be either the best or the worst, a benefit to God or a gift to the Devil. Mailer was undecided whether the Beatles were “demons or saints”; he thought the Twist was evil and that masturbation was a vice; he disapproved of contraception.

After enormous effort, Mailer had managed to define himself in the terms of an intellectual culture that was just about to go out of fashion. Within fifteen years, every element in this way of thinking was discredited or obsolete. Like many apostles of change, he ended up a symptom of the times he set out to transform.

Mailer’s cosmology was not just a literary conceit; it was the prism through which he understood himself. Mailer met Adele Morales in 1951, when his marriage to Bea was breaking up. Adele was Latina—her mother was Spanish and her father was Peruvian—but she grew up in Bensonhurst, and when Mailer met her she was an art student, studying painting with Hans Hofmann, in the Village. She was, in short, a typical young New Yorker with creative ambitions, but Mailer saw her as an exotic, and, as he later did with Norris Church, whose name he invented, he imagined himself in a Henry Higgins role. The relationship was highly sexual. (“Am I fucking too much?” Mailer asked himself in his diary from that period.)

The stabbing took place in the early morning of November 20, 1960, a month after Mailer made his spectacular New Journalistic début, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” a report for Esquire on the Democratic National Convention that nominated John F. Kennedy for President. Mailer had planned a party in anticipation of his announcement that he was running for mayor. He wanted to bring together people from all walks of life, both bankers and street people. None of the former showed up, but a number of the latter were among the two hundred or so guests who came to the Mailers’ apartment, on West Ninety-fourth Street.

If it fell short of Mailer’s vision, it was still an unusual gathering. The guests included the Paris Review editor George Plimpton, the Columbia sociologist C. Wright Mills, the bandleader Peter Duchin, the screenwriter Donald Stewart* (“The Philadelphia Story”), the publisher Jason Epstein, the editors Robert Silvers (then at Harper’s) and Norman Podhoretz (of Commentary), and the poet Allen Ginsberg. The mood seems to have been sour from the start. Mailer wore a bullfighter’s shirt, got drunk, and kept going outside to pick fights on the street. Adele shut herself in the bathroom with a friend to complain about her marriage. Ginsberg got into an argument with Podhoretz and called him a “big dumb fuckhead”—which, since Ginsberg was the most pacific of men, was a sure sign that the karma was not good.

By the time the stabbing occurred, most of the guests had left. According to both his and her recollections, Adele taunted Mailer and called him a fag, and he stabbed her, with a penknife, twice, in the back and in the abdomen. The second wound pierced her pericardium. She was taken to the hospital, and underwent a four-hour operation. Mailer showed up before the surgery and gave the doctor some advice. Afterward, in her hospital room, he explained why he had stabbed her. “I love you and I had to save you from cancer,” he said. Years later, discussing the stabbing with his daughter Susan, he told her, “I let God down.”

Nearly everyone who knew the Mailers, and whose reflections have been reported, blamed Adele. In the literary world, the act was interpreted by the lights of the modernist myth of the artist. James Baldwin, no admirer of “The White Negro,” explained that, by trying to kill his wife, Mailer was hoping to rescue the writer in himself from the spiritual prison he had created with his fantasies of becoming a politician: “It is like burning down the house in order, at last, to be free of it.” Lionel Trilling told his wife, Diana, that the stabbing was, in her words, “a Dostoevskyan ploy”: Mailer was testing the limits of evil in himself.

The stabbing seems to have enhanced Mailer’s social and literary cachet. He began his affair with the woman who became his third wife, Jeanne Campbell, while Adele was still recovering, and during the next ten years he seemed to be everywhere. From 1962 through 1972, he published seventeen books (several were collections of previously published pieces), directed three movies, and relaunched his campaign for mayor. He was nearly irresistible, until he hit an immovable object.

Mailer saw the women’s movement as, potentially, part of the drift toward totalitarianism. The great horror that it pointed to, and that he thought was implicit in its program, was in-vitro fertilization—the ability of women to conceive children without the sexual participation of men. In his response to the movement, “The Prisoner of Sex,” which came out in 1971, he laid out his sexual cosmology, much of which must have come as news to most women—for example, that women have always had the power to choose unconsciously (not a contradiction in Mailer-land) whether or not to become pregnant during a sexual encounter.

To promote the book, he agreed to m.c. a panel at Town Hall, composed of the Australian feminist Germaine Greer, who was promoting her own book, “The Female Eunuch”; Jill Johnston, a Voice columnist and lesbian activist; Jacqueline Ceballos, the president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women; and Diana Trilling.

The evening was a carnival. There was continual heckling; the Beat poet Gregory Corso noisily walked out of the hall; Johnston was rushed at the end of her presentation by two women who began groping her onstage. Betty Friedan, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Cynthia Ozick asked questions from the floor, all addressed to Mailer, who presided in a business suit and tie, his uniform at the time. Greer stole the show, but in a way that gave Mailer the appearance of being a sexist who might be worth reforming.

Mailer was not at his worst that evening, but he never really got over it. He never really understood the women’s movement, either. “The whole question of women’s liberation is the deepest question that faces us,” he said at Town Hall, “and we’re gonna go right into the very elements of existence and eternity before we’re through with it.” Unless you are the kind of person who thinks that the Beatles pose an urgent eschatological problem, this is exactly wrong. A lot of confusion is caused by the Shakespeare’s (or Mozart’s) sister argument. The point of the women’s movement was not to create a society in which exceptional women can produce great work. It was to create a society in which the life chances of a mediocre woman are no different from the life chances of a mediocre man. It was about normalizing society, not turning it upside down. Eternity had nothing to do with it.

The stabbing had not disrupted Mailer’s career path, but the women’s movement did. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Mailer had depended on the interest and support of an intellectual community, centered in New York City, whose authority extended from the English departments at Columbia and Rutgers to journals like Dissent, Commentary, Partisan Review, and The New York Review of Books. Mailer understood how valuable that support was. The first people he went to see after he was released from Bellevue, in 1960, were the Podhoretzes and the Trillings.

After 1970, though, that community, and the journalistic and academic worlds generally, began to split apart. Feminism had something to do with this. Feminist intellectuals found the university (marginally) more welcoming than places like Partisan Review. The mid-century modernist canon slid into neglect and even disrepute; existentialism went out of fashion; the cult of jazz was dead. There was a new syllabus. Mailer was on it, but as a minor figure of academic interest, someone who worked along the interestingly problematic fact-fiction border. Intellectually, he became a token of everything that was being supplanted.

By then, though, he had found a different community for support and nourishment. This was the very community that he had made his name in the nineteen-fifties by denouncing: the publishing industry. The obscenity cases of the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties helped to transform publishing from an industry of genteel, privately owned firms (with a few pirates) into one of publicly traded companies run by businessmen. In 1959, Random House went public, and used the capital to buy two other houses, Knopf and Pantheon. In 1965, the entire company was bought by RCA, which owned NBC. Publishing became big business.

Gentility was not part of the new ethos, because gentility did not sell books. Readers no longer associated sexual explicitness with avant-garde obscurity or with smut. And since, legally, literary merit now trumped virtually any kind of obscenity, the ideal product for trade publishers was a work by a writer of highbrow reputation that contained plenty of explicit sexual content. By the mid-nineteen-sixties, this had become a best-selling formula. It was the period of John Barth’s “Giles Goat-Boy,” the unexpurgated edition of J. P. Donleavy’s “The Ginger Man,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Gore Vidal’s “Myra Breckenridge,” and John Updike’s “Couples.”

Mailer was the darling of the post-“Lady Chatterley” publishing business. No serious writer had greater name recognition, and this meant that reviews didn’t matter. People bought Mailer’s books because they were books by Norman Mailer. And obscenity brought out the stylist in him; it helped him form his mature, post-naturalist voice. The flat-affect prose of “The Naked and the Dead”—

When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei—

disappeared almost completely, replaced by a range of high-rhetorical registers, all the way up to the quasi-surrealist rapping of “Why Are We in Vietnam?”:

D.J.’s mother, Death-Row Jethroe, is the prettiest little blonde you ever saw (looks like a draw between young Katherine Anne Porter and young Clare Booth Luce, whew) all perfume snatchy poo, appears thirty-five, is forty-five, airs, humors, curl to her mouth, half Texas ass accent, half London wickedness, trill and thrill, she’s been traveling around the world, Heartache House in Bombay and Freedom House in Bringthatpore, shit, she’s been getting cunt-tickled and fucked by all the Class I Dongs in Paris and London, not to mention the upper dedicated pricks of Rome and Italy while her hus, big daddy Rusty Jethroe, is keeping up the corporation end all over the world including Dallas, Big D, Tex.

Anyone who published that in 1950 would have ended up in court.

In 1971, the year of the Town Hall debate, Mailer signed a million-dollar contract, reported to be a record, to write a trilogy that, according to his agent, would “encompass the entire history of a human family from ancient times to the world of the future.” This was the deal that yielded, twelve years later, “Ancient Evenings.” But the book confirmed the industry’s thinking: in the Times Book Review, Benjamin DeMott called the novel “a disaster,” and it spent seventeen weeks on the best-seller list and made back the advance.

The million-dollar deal began a pattern of big advances for projects with clear commercial potential. These included texts for three picture books—two on Marilyn Monroe, one on graffiti—and “The Executioner’s Song,” the book piece of a multimedia enterprise. Mailer had a keen sense of financial opportunity, but little sense of husbandry, so his contracts eventually took the form of monthly payments at the rate of thirty thousand dollars.

Though it is not uncritical, Lennon’s biography generally makes the best case possible for its protagonist. This involves some selection. Lennon omits entirely the story of Mailer’s relationship with the Provincetown writer Peter Manso, for example. They were close friends, at one time sharing a house. In 1985, Manso published an ambitious oral biography called “Mailer: His Life and Times.” Mailer was unhappy with it, and the two men began a feud that lasted, with unrelenting bitterness, until the end of Mailer’s life.

On the other hand, Lennon devotes a great deal of space to a consideration of Mailer’s theory that the Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani was trying to sabotage his sales by running negative reviews well before his books’ publication dates. Mailer believed that she was a feminist, and out to get him; Lennon sees fit to quote Mailer’s characterization of her as a “token” and a “posterior aperture.”

Mailer does seem to have believed that the feminists did him in, that they made him a pariah in certain intellectual circles and toxic as a public figure. Lennon (and this may be the effect of so much contact with his subject) appears sympathetic to the theory. He is consequently sometimes elliptical when he confronts the troublesome topic of Mailer and women.

For example, before Gloria Steinem became the founding editor of Ms., she worked on Mailer’s 1969 mayoral campaign. Lennon says that Mailer “pursued her romantically, and they had a one-night stand.” This is true as far as it goes, but, as Steinem told two of her biographers, the tryst was unconsummated, because Mailer was unable to get an erection. She attributed this to too much alcohol on his part and too little interest on hers. Steinem also said that Mailer explained to her that legal abortion was better than birth control, because “at least that way women know they’re murderers.” Lennon doesn’t report this, either.

Mailer and Greer were both flirtatious and uninhibited people, and their relations have long been a subject of speculation. Diana Trilling thought that Mailer was attracted, but a little afraid of her. Lennon tells the story that, sometime after Town Hall, Mailer and Greer ran into each other at a dinner party, and, in the cab to her hotel, she tried to persuade him to come up to her room. According to Lennon, Mailer refused, stopped the cab, and got out. But Greer recounts the cab story in an essay she wrote a few months after Town Hall, and says that she told Mailer she was going to meet a friend. Lennon doesn’t offer her version.

Then, there is the stabbing. According to Adele’s memoir, “After the Party,” someone tried to help her after she was stabbed, but Mailer kicked her. “Get away from her,” he said. “Let the bitch die.” She says that some of Mailer’s friends presented her with a petition asking her to refuse to allow doctors to administer shock treatment to her husband, on the ground that it might damage his creative genius. Mailer’s mother came to see her, not to express sympathy but to insist that she tell the police that she had got her injuries by falling on a broken bottle. She says that Mailer told her to lie to the grand jury and say she couldn’t remember who had stabbed her, and that he didn’t apologize to her until 1988, at a reception for their daughter’s wedding. “I’m sorry I trashed your life,” he said. “You trashed your life, too,” was her reply. None of this is in Lennon’s book.

“Mailer confuses the life of action with the life of acting out,” the sociologist Ned Polsky wrote, in Dissent, in a response to “The White Negro.” Mailer took chances. He was sometimes ridiculously wrong; he was sometimes refreshingly right; he was never uninteresting. But, in the end, he was a play outlaw. Like the rest of us, he wanted approval. Back in the nineteen-fifties, when he was denouncing from on high the philistinism of the book business, he had his friend Mickey Knox, an actor, go into bookstores pretending to be a customer, asking the salespeople what they thought of “The Deer Park.” He had to know why he wasn’t popular.

Lennon’s over-all argument seems right: “Mailer’s desire for fame, and his distaste for it, never abated over his long career.” Mailer courted fame, but he didn’t know how to deal with it. The absence of attention made him anxious, and so did attention. A man who has so many mistresses, and has to have a partner waiting at home at the same time, is a needy man. Still, in spite of the vulnerability, and in spite of the botched projects and the preposterous and occasionally offensive theories and the personal misadventures, miscalculations that would have upended the careers of most writers, he produced some remarkable and original books. ♦

*An earlier version of this article misstated the name of one of the guests; it was the writer Donald Stewart, not his father, the screenwriter, Donald Ogden Stewart.