Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery
Page 93
Payne, Robert. Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung. New York: Abelard-Shuman, 1961.
Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. New York: Random House, 1993; Anchor Books, 1994*.
Ragano, Frank, and Selwyn Raab. Mob Lawyer. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994.
Summers, Anthony. Conspiracy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980; Paragon House, 1989 and 1991*.
Wise, David. The American Police State: The Government Against the People. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
UNPUBLISHED AND MISCELLANEOUS MATERIALS
Compilation of Oswald’s earnings and expenditures from the Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, Mary McHughes Ferrell, 1993.
Interview of Marguerite Oswald by Lawrence Schiller, 1976, © New Ingot Company.
Interview of Jack Ruby by Lawrence Schiller, 1966, © Alskog, Inc. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA Central Library, Silver Spring, Md., temperature records for Clinton, Lousiana, September 1963.
Transcript of dialogue, Frontline, “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” produced by WGBH, Boston, Mass., and broadcast on PBS stations, November (various dates) 1993.
NORMAN MAILER was born in 1923 and published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969; Mailer received another Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner’s Song. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
BY NORMAN MAILER
The Naked and the Dead
Barbary Shore
The Deer Park
Advertisements for Myself
Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)
The Presidential Papers
An American Dream
Cannibals and Christians
Why Are We in Vietnam?
The Deer Park—A Play
The Armies of the Night
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Of a Fire on the Moon
The Prisoner of Sex
Maidstone
Existential Errands
St. George and the Godfather
Marilyn
The Faith of Graffiti
The Fight
Genius and Lust
The Executioner’s Song
Of Women and Their Elegance
Pieces and Pontifications
Ancient Evenings
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Harlot’s Ghost
Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
The Gospel According to the Son
The Time of Our Time
Why Are We at War?
The Spooky Art
Modest Gifts
The Castle in the Forest
Praise for Oswald’s Tale
“A masterpiece.”
—The Economist
“The intelligence of Mailer, the power of his imagination, and the sense, really, that this is a great novelist like Balzac or Dostoevsky or Dickens. There’s something magnificent about this imagination and the way he goes for the darkness of the United States. It’s very, very powerful.”
—BBC Late Review
“Brilliant . . . Spellbinding . . . His finest achievement since The Executioner’s Song.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Mailer is excellent on the exalted state of mind Oswald must have been in during the last couple of days before the motorcade.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Constantly fascinating . . . The greatest body of information on the Oswalds yet attempted . . . Of his books this one most closely resembles The Executioner’s Song.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
“There are heart-stopping moments . . . . Watching a major novelist wrap his instincts around the drab figure at the center of one of America’s greatest tragedies makes a fascinating study.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Oswald’s Tale is terrific, thrilling with vitality and intelligence and wit, and organized with an inventive cunning that makes the reading utterly compelling . . . . Mailer is able to reconstruct Oswald’s American life in the same convincing detail as his life in Minsk. That is some achievement, and an even greater one is the portrait of Oswald that emerges . . . . His Oswald is both likeable and repulsive, to be pitied and feared . . . . This book may not be the last word on Oswald, but it is odds-on there will never be a better.”
—The Daily Telegraph
“Vintage Mailer . . . [His] gifts for getting inside a character’s skin have never been more acute than with Oswald; his complex, equivocal wife, Marina; his mother, finally given her moment to explain her life; and Jack Ruby, given his moment to justify his. A very large cast of secondary characters, in both Russia and the United States, are not just sketched but brought to life . . . . More than any other book on the Kennedy assassination, this one will live with you.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Fascinating . . . One of the several amazing things about Oswald’s Tale is that we can actually read some of the transcripts of private conversations between Lee and Marina Oswald in their bugged apartment in Minsk.”
—The Village Voice
“Important new insight into the story of the century.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“The real thrust of his magnificent book is the insight we gain into a complex man. Simply put, we understand Oswald more now than we ever did before.”
—Booklist (starred review)
FOOTNOTES
* This must be an error. He started in January of 1960 and quit in May 1962—twenty-eight months.
Return to text.
* Oswald uses Young Communist or Young Communist League or YCL interchangeably as a translation into English of Komsomol.
Return to text.
* This “sic!!” is misspelled in the original manuscript as “sich!!”
Return to text.
Oswald’s Tale is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2007 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1995 by Norman Mailer
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1995.
English translations of government documents from the Russian Republic are copyright © 1994 Polaris Communications, Inc., and Norman Mailer.
English translations of government documents from the Republic of Belarus are copyright © 1994 Polaris Communications, Inc., and Norman Mailer.
Interview of Marguerite Oswald by Lawrence Schiller is copyright © 1976 by The New Ingot Company, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
CAROL PUBLISHING GROUP: Excerpts from Passport to Assassination: The Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him by Oleg M. Nechiporenko, translated by Todd R. Bludeau. Copyright © 1993 by Oleg M. Nechiporenko. Published by arrangement with Carol Publishing Group. A Birch Lane Book. Reprinted by permission.
EDWARD J. EPSTEIN: Excerpts from Legends: The Secret Life of Lee Harvey Oswald by Edward J. Epstein. Copyright © 1978 by Edward J. Epstein. Reprinted by permission of the author.
HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS, INC.: Excerpts from The Death of a President by William Manchester. Copyright © William Manchester. Reprinted by permission.
ROBERT LEE OSWALD: Excerpts from Lee: Portrait of Lee Harvey Os
wald by Robert Oswald. Reprinted with permission from Robert Lee Oswald.
RUSSELL & VOLKENING, INC.: Excerpts from Marina and Lee by Priscilla Johnson Macmillan (William Morrow & Co., 1977). Copyright © 1977 by Priscilla Johnson Macmillan. Reprinted by permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author.
RANDOM HOUSE, INC., AND LITTLE BROWN AND COMPANY (U.K.): Excerpts from Case Closed by Gerald Posner. Copyright © 1993 by Gerald L. Posner. Rights throughout the world excluding the United Kingdom are controlled by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and Little, Brown and Company (U.K.).
STERLING LORD LITERISTIC, INC.: Excerpts from Conspiracy by Anthony Summers (Paragon House Publishers). Copyright © by Anthony Summers. Reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.
THUNDER’S MOUTH PRESS: Excerpts from The Last Investigation by Gaeton Fonzi. Reprinted by permission of Thunder’s Mouth Press.
WGBH: Excerpts from the November 1993 Frontline broadcast entitled “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” Reprinted by permission.
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-593-4
v3.0