Everything you need to understand or teach The Executioner's
Song by Norman Mailer. Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song is
many things, and its status between the realms of fiction and
non-fiction makes it difficult to define. It is not non-fiction,
notwithstanding the author's claim in his Afterword. The
Pulitzer Prize Committee recognized Mailer's work as a
"...thoroughly imagined work of fiction." This novel is not a
work of non-fiction, but it is also not wholly a work of
fiction. The book's form causes us to examine the line between
reality and perception. What is the truth? How is truth colored
by the telling of it, whether through a novel or through the
rules of a trial? Are the points of view about Gilmore that
Mailer describes "truth" in any way? Executioner's Song is the
novelized story of the life and death of Gary Mark Gilmore, the
first person to be legally executed in the United States
following a ten-year hiatus on executions imposed by... View
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