J. Michael Lennon  J. Michael Lennon is an American academic and writer who is the Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University and the late Norman Mailer’s archivist and authorized biographer. He published Mailer's official biography "Norman Mailer: A Double Life" in 2013. He edited Mailer's selected letters in 2014 and the Library of America's two-volume set "Norman Mailer: The Sixties" in 2018. Lennon, a native of Cape Cod, grew up in Somerset, Massachusetts. He graduated from Stonehill College, a Catholic school south of Boston, in 1963 and became a U.S. Navy officer during the Vietnam War. After sea duty on the USS Uvalde for 30 months, he taught military law and history at Naval O.C.S. Newport in the late 1960s. He served five years on active duty (1964-1968). He first encountered the work on Norman Mailer when he read "The Naked and the Dead" as a fifteen-year-old: "The language was uninhibited, the sexual descriptions, the descriptions of war. ... It's really an odyssey of suffering." He earned his M.A. (1969) and Ph.D. (1975) in English at the University of Rhode Island, where he began his scholarly work on Mailer in the classes of Dr. Nancy Potter, who directed his dissertation on Mailer's "Armies of the Night". While working on his dissertation in 1971, Lennon watched Gore Vidal and Mailer's altercation on "The Dick Cavett Show". Lennon wrote a letter of support to Mailer who then invited Lennon to hear him speak. Afterward, they met at a bar and began their long friendship and collaboration. Mailer enjoyed the Irish "bravura" and sense of humor, so he took an immediate liking to Lennon. Lennon and his wife Donna and their sons became friendly with Mailer's family, including all nine children, and his sister Barbara Wasserman and her son Peter Alson, and enjoyed regular visits in the summers. Lennon became Mailer's literary executor in 1981 and proposed a collection of Mailer's essays and interviews which became the 1982 collection, "Pieces and Pontifications", which Lennon edited. Mailer would later add: "Sometimes I think Mike Lennon and I were as designed for each other as some species of American Yin and Yang, as hot dogs, perhaps, and mustard. His talents, his discipline, and his ambition form a complement to all the slacks, voids, and indolences of my nature."