Oswald's Tale; An American Mystery

New York: Random House, 1995. First Trade Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. [16], 791, [1], xxxvii, [3] pages. Appendix. Glossary of Names. Notes. Bibliography. Signed by the author on the half-title page. Minor edge and DJ soiling. Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 - November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor, and liberal political activist. His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948 and brought him early and wide renown. His 1968 nonfiction novel Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction as well as the National Book Award. His best-known work is widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, the 1979 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In over six decades of work, Mailer had eleven best-selling books in each of the seven decades after World War II-more than any other post-war American writer. In 1955, Mailer and three others founded The Village Voice, an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper from Greenwich Village. Mailer wrote 12 novels over a 59-year span. Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery is a 1995 non-fiction book by Norman Mailer. It amounts to a detailed biography of Lee Harvey Oswald (1939-1963), the assassin of US President John F. Kennedy. The book includes an exhaustive examination of Oswald's movements over the years, and particularly in the months, leading up to Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, and Oswald's own death two days later. The Oswald that Mailer depicts is a single-minded and vain individual convinced of his own destiny and importance who suffers a series of defeats, and who killed the President in a desperate search for achievement. When Oswald returns to Dallas in 1963 with his wife and daughter, he still has dreams, and is still frustrated and unhappy. His April 1963 assassination attempt on General Edwin Walker, a John Birch Society supporter, shows him acting out his belief that he is an instrument of history in the months leading up to November 22, 1963.