The final work of fiction from Norman Mailer, a defining voice of the postwar era, is also one of his most ambitious, taking as its subject the evil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man in possession of extraordinary secrets, follows Adolf from birth through adolescence and offers revealing portraits of Hitler's parents and siblings. A crucial reflection on the shadows that eclipsed the twentieth century, Mailer's novel delivers myriad twists and surprises along with characteristically astonishing insights into the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all.
Praise for The Castle in the Forest "This remarkable novel about the young Adolf Hitler, his family and their shifting circumstances, is Mailer's most perfect apprehension of the absolutely alien. . . . Mailer doesn't inhabit these historical figures so much as possess them."
--The New York Times Book Review "Terrifically creepy . . . an icy and convincing portrait of the dictator as a young sociopath."
--Entertainment Weekly "The work of a bold and confident writer who may yet be seen as the preeminent novelist of our time . . . a source of tremendous narrative pleasure . . . Every character . . . lives and breathes."
--South Florida Sun-Sentinel "Blackly hilarious, beautifully written . . . [
The Castle in the Forest] has vigor, excitement, humor and vastness of spirit."
--The New York Observer Praise for Norman Mailer "[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation."
--The New York Times "A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent."
--The New Yorker "Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure."
--The Washington Post "A devastatingly alive and original creative mind."
--Life "Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance."
--The New York Review of Books "The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book."
--Chicago Tribune "Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream."
--The Cincinnati Post
Born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner's Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.
