Description

One man’s death wish became America’s obsession.

In 1976, Gary Gilmore murdered two men – then demanded to die for it. His trial and televised execution became a media spectacle, and ensured that his execution turned into the most gruesome media event of the decade.

Mailer’s Pulitzer-winning epic combines journalistic detail with novelistic intensity. The Executioner’s Song is not just a chronicle of crime, but a haunting portrait of a country addicted to retribution.

Publisher Review

A great writer: in the utterly enthralling story of Gary Gilmore's life and crimes Norman Mailer takes one as deeply into the criminal mind as it is possible to get * Alan Sillitoe * A deeply unsettling account of a particular ordeal that suggests larger questions: the moralities of power's ends and means, the character of revolutionary fanaticism and the indecipherable humanity that flickers within it...by turns evocative, wise and crisscrossed by fury * New York Times Book Review * His greatest work was his 1979 epic The Executioner's Song... a masterpiece of reportage, fiction and stylistic writing * Observer *