Nachem Malech Mailer, known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American writer and filmmaker. In a career spanning more than six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II.
William Louis Petersen is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Gil Grissom in the CBS drama thriller series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–2015), for which he won a Screen Actors Guild Award and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award; he was further nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards as a producer of the show. He reprised his role as Gil Grissom in the sequel CSI: Vegas, which premiered on October 6, 2021.
The Executioner's Song (1979) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning true crime novel by Norman Mailer that depicts the events related to the execution of Gary Gilmore for murder by the state of Utah. The title of the book may be a play on "The Lord High Executioner's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. "The Executioner's Song" is also the title of a poem by Mailer, published in Fuck You magazine in September 1964 and reprinted in Cannibals and Christians (1966), and the title of one of the chapters of his 1975 non-fiction book The Fight.
Jack Henry Abbott was an American criminal and author. With a long history of criminal convictions, Abbott's writing concerning his life and experiences was lauded by a number of well-known literary critics, including author Norman Mailer. Due partly to lobbying by Mailer and others on Abbott's behalf, Abbott was released from prison in 1981 where he was serving sentences for forgery, manslaughter, and bank robbery. Abbott's memoir In the Belly of the Beast was published with positive reviews soon after his release. Six weeks after being paroled from prison, Abbott stabbed and killed a waiter outside a New York City cafe. Abbott was convicted and sent back to prison, where he killed himself in 2002.
Long Walk to Freedom is an autobiography by South Africa's first democratically elected President Nelson Mandela, and it was first published in 1994 by Little Brown & Co. The book profiles his early life, coming of age, education and 27 years spent in prison. Under the apartheid government, Mandela was regarded as a terrorist and jailed on Robben Island for his role as a leader of the then-outlawed African National Congress (ANC) and its armed wing the Umkhonto We Sizwe. He later achieved international recognition for his leadership as president in rebuilding the country's once segregationist society. The last chapters of the book describe his political ascension and his belief that the struggle still continued against apartheid in South Africa.
Leo Vincelette Felton is an American white supremacist of African American descent who was convicted of bank robbery and plotting to build a bomb in Boston to attack Jewish-Americans, colloquially referred to as the 2002 white supremacist terror plot. Felton was released from prison in 2019 after serving 17 years.
Ghosts... of the Civil Dead is a 1988 Australian drama-suspense film directed by John Hillcoat. It was written by Hillcoat, Evan English, Gene Conkie, Nick Cave and Hugo Race. It is partly based on the true story of Jack Henry Abbott.
Joan Abse was an English author and art historian. She was the wife of Welsh poet and physician Dannie Abse.
The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster is a 9,000-word essay by Norman Mailer that connects the "psychic havoc" wrought by the Holocaust and atomic bomb to the aftermath of slavery in America in the figuration of the Hipster, or the "white negro". The essay is a call to abandon Eisenhower liberalism and a numbing culture of conformity and psychoanalysis in favor of the rebelliousness, personal violence and emancipating sexuality that Mailer associates with marginalized black culture. The White Negro was first published in the 1957 special issue of Dissent, before being published separately by City Lights. Mailer's essay was controversial upon its release and received a mixed reception, winning praise, for example, from Eldridge Cleaver and criticism from James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Allen Ginsberg. Baldwin, in particular, heavily criticized the work, asserting that it perpetuated the notorious "myth of the sexuality of Negros" and stating that it was beneath Mailer's talents. The work remains his most famous and most reprinted essay and it established Mailer's reputation as a "philosopher of hip".
Psychopathy, or psychopathic personality, is a personality construct characterized by impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, impulsive, egocentric traits, masked by superficial charm and the outward appearance of apparent normalcy.
Jack Olsen was an American journalist and author known for his crime reporting.
The Psychopathy Checklist or Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, now the Psychopathy Checklist—revised (PCL-R), is a psychological assessment tool that is commonly used to assess the presence and extent of psychopathy in individuals—most often those institutionalized in the criminal justice system—and to differentiate those high in this trait from those with antisocial personality disorder, a related diagnosable disorder. It is a 20-item inventory of perceived personality traits and recorded behaviors, intended to be completed on the basis of a semi-structured interview along with a review of "collateral information" such as official records. The psychopath tends to display a constellation or combination of high narcissistic, borderline, and antisocial personality disorder traits, which includes superficial charm, charisma/attractiveness, sexual seductiveness and promiscuity, affective instability, suicidality, lack of empathy, feelings of emptiness, self-harm, and splitting. In addition, sadistic and paranoid traits are usually also present.
American prison literature is literature written by Americans who are incarcerated. It is a distinct literary phenomenon that is increasingly studied as such by academics.
Why Are We In Vietnam? (WWVN) is a 1967 novel by the American author Norman Mailer. It focuses on a hunting trip to the Brooks Range in Alaska where a young man is brought by his father, a wealthy businessman who works for a company that makes cigarette filters and is obsessed with killing a grizzly bear. As the novel progresses, the protagonist is increasingly disillusioned that his father resorts to hunting tactics that seem dishonest and weak, including the use of a helicopter and taking credit for killing a bear. At the end of the novel, the protagonist tells the reader that he is soon going to serve in the Vietnam War as a soldier.
Belly of the Beast is a 2003 action film starring Steven Seagal.
Fictional portrayals of psychopaths, or sociopaths, are some of the most notorious in film and literature but may only vaguely or partly relate to the concept of psychopathy, which is itself used with varying definitions by mental health professionals, criminologists and others. The character may be identified as a diagnosed/assessed psychopath or sociopath within the fictional work itself, or by its creator when discussing their intentions with the work, which might be distinguished from opinions of audiences or critics based only on a character appearing to show traits or behaviors associated with an undefined popular stereotype of psychopathy.
The Crystal Ballroom was a music venue that opened in 1978 in St Kilda, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia. Located within the George Hotel at 125 Fitzroy Street, it quickly became the epicentre of Melbourne's post-punk scene, launching the careers of The Birthday Party, Dead Can Dance and other local groups, as well as hosting international acts, including The Cure, New Order and The Fall.
Psychopathy, from psych and pathy, was coined by German psychiatrists in the 19th century and originally just meant what would today be called mental disorder, the study of which is still known as psychopathology. By the turn of the century 'psychopathic inferiority' referred to the type of mental disorder that might now be termed personality disorder, along with a wide variety of other conditions now otherwise classified. Through the early 20th century this and other terms such as 'constitutional (inborn) psychopaths' or 'psychopathic personalities', were used very broadly to cover anyone who violated legal or moral expectations or was considered inherently socially undesirable in some way.
Henry and Cato is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1976, it was her eighteenth novel.
This is the discography of Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave. In addition to his career as lead singer of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, he has released 1 studio album, 11 soundtrack albums, 1 extended play, 2 short soundtracks, 3 singles, 3 live albums, and 1 compilation album. Since 2005, the majority of his work has been written & recorded in collaboration with Bad Seeds member and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis.
