The Executioner’s Song
Gary Gilmore demanded his own execution, and Mailer simply gets out of the way.
Gary Gilmore murdered two men in Utah in 1976 and then demanded the state carry out his death sentence, which it did by firing squad, ending a decade-long national moratorium. Mailer worked from Lawrence Schiller’s interview archive and wrote a thousand pages in plain declarative prose, keeping himself out of it entirely. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and it is the least mannered thing he ever produced.
Recommended by 1 Person
Laurence Leamer
He steps back and lets the story tell itself. With the most sensitive, intimate details, he writes about the murderer Gary Gilmore, whose execution in 1977 was the first in the U.S. in almost a decade.
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