The Executioner's Song

True crime

First published: 1979
Print length: 1056 pagesVintage International, 1998

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1980

Description

After thirteen years in prison for armed robbery, Gary Gilmore returns to Utah and tries to establish an ordinary life with help from his cousin. A volatile relationship with Nicole Baker unfolds alongside substance use, theft, anger, and his inability to remain within the limits imposed by work and parole. When Gilmore kills two men during separate robberies, the narrative widens from his troubled circle to the victims’ families, police, lawyers, journalists, and the machinery of capital punishment. Convicted and sentenced to death, Gilmore refuses efforts to prolong his appeals. Built from extensive interviews and documentary research, Mailer’s true-crime narrative examines the anguish of the murders and the national conflict over an execution the condemned man demands.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dialogue-driven · Direct · Journalistic · Spare

Pace

Measured

Tone

Bleak · Dark · Detached · Tense

Structure

Braided · Chronological nonfiction

Focus

Character · Ideas · Information

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

AddictionCrime and punishmentGriefJusticeMortalityRedemption

About Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, and filmmaker whose career extended across more than six decades. He first gained wide attention with The Naked and the Dead, a war novel that established his interest in people tested by institutions, violence, and competing forms of authority. He moved restlessly between fiction and factual writing, helping to shape New Journalism by bringing the scene-making, characterization, and subjective perspective of the novel into reportage. The Armies of the Night makes his own unstable public persona part of its account of an antiwar demonstration, while The Executioner’s Song uses extensive reporting and documentary material to examine crime, punishment, and the people drawn into both. His fiction could be satirical, essayistic, and formally experimental, from The Deer Park’s study of Hollywood ambition to the fractured masculine ordeal of Why Are We in Vietnam? Across these forms, Mailer repeatedly returned to power, conformity, freedom, violence, and the difficulty of remaining fully human within modern systems.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Vintage International
Language: English
ISBN: 9780375700811

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