01753cam a2200253 4500 1868979462 TxAuBib 20250123120000.0 190124s1979||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 9780446584388 paperback $24.99 044658438X paperback $24.99 TxAuBib Mailer, Norman. The executioner's song / by Norman Mailer. New York : Grand Central Publishing, 1979. 1109 pages ; 23 cm. In what is arguably his greatest work, America's most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America's prisons who became notorious for two reasons: first, for robbing two men in 1976, then killing them in cold blood; and, second, after being tried and convicted, for insisting on dying for his crime. To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed paradoxically intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death. Norman Mailer tells Gilmore's story--and those of the men and women caught up in his procession toward the firing squad--with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscapes and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. The Executioner's Song is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest sources of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement--impossible to put down, impossible to forget. 20250123. True crime. Executions and executioners. Murder investigation. Biographical fiction. Creative nonfiction. lcgft