The winner of every major national literary award, the preeminent novelist of his generation, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a movie director, politician, pugilist, antiwar activist, hipster, philosopher, and enfant terrible, Norman Mailer has been maligned, loved, hated, belittled, idolized -- but never ignored. This sweeping biography captures the legend's extraordinary life and career in his own fascinating words and in vivid accounts by his famous peers, friends, enemies, wives, lovers, and family members. Mailer is an extraordinary tapestry, a portrait of an era as well as a man -- as protean as the subject himself and just as overflowing with life....

When you look back at its history, you can see a progression in Provincetown, things getting wilder and wilder, the outlaw element becoming the norm....

Provincetown, Cape Cod: This small Massachusetts enclave has long been home to pirates, commune-dwellers, artists, and other noble countrymen who value liberty over law -- from Norman Mailer and Tennessee Williams to John Waters, Robert Motherwell, and former congressman Gerry Studds. With one of the largest homosexual populations per capita of any town or city in the United States, and some of the highest beachfront real estate prices in the Northeast, Provincetown is a thriving tourist spot that attracts more than one million visitors each year. Here, acclaimed writer and longtime Ptown resident Peter Manso brings together all the celebrities and townsfolk, history and happenstance, and politics and gossip to offer an unparalleled account of this unconventional seaside society -- a place, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, where "one may stand...and put all of America behind him."...