The Executioner's Song (Modern Library)

About this book

Winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize In what is arguably his greatest book Americas most heroically ambitious writer follows the short blighted career of Gary Gilmore an intractably violent product of Americas 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 Gilmores 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 Gilmores Utah. The Executioners 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. From the Trade Paperback edition.