Marilyn
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, Inc., 1973. Item #05834
“Marilyn”
Norman Mailer’s Lavish Tribute to Hollywood’s Most Enduring Icon
Signed by Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller
MONROE, Marilyn. Marilyn a Biography by Norman Mailer. Pictures by the world's foremost photographers. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, [1973].
First Edition, First Printing Stated. Quarto (10 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches; 267 x 235 mm.). [2, signed leaf, verso blank], [1]-270, [1], [1, blank], pp. Photographic illustrations throughout, many in full color.
Publisher's padded white silk, front cover with title in blind, spine lettered in blank, marbled endpapers. A fine copy. Housed in the publisher's black cloth clamshell case, inset photograph on front panel, marbled paper lining, near fine.
A sumptuous and visually arresting tribute to Marilyn Monroe, combining Norman Mailer’s speculative and highly personal meditation on Monroe’s life with one of the richest assembled collections of Marilyn photography ever published. Produced on a grand scale and lavishly illustrated throughout, the volume captures the mythic transformation of Norma Jeane Mortenson into perhaps the defining American cultural icon of the twentieth century.
Mailer’s text - part biography, part cultural essay, part psychological portrait - deliberately avoids the conventions of traditional biography. As Mailer himself acknowledged, much of the narrative was constructed through intuition and imaginative reconstruction, creating not merely a life of Monroe, but an exploration of celebrity, sexuality, vulnerability, and fame in postwar America.
The extraordinary photographic content remains the book’s greatest achievement. Drawn from the work of many of the twentieth century’s leading photographers - including Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Eve Arnold, Philippe Halsman, Bert Stern, and Milton Greene - the images chronicle Monroe’s evolution from studio contract player to international phenomenon. Together they form one of the most important visual archives devoted to Marilyn Monroe ever issued in book form.
This signed limited issue, elegantly bound and preserved in its original clamshell case, is among the most desirable presentations of Mailer’s celebrated Monroe volume - a striking fusion of Hollywood glamour, photographic history, and American literary celebrity.
Bricusse’s own memoir provides an interesting parallel to the world represented here. In Pure Imagination he recalls Arthur P. Jacobs, formerly Marilyn Monroe’s press agent, who later became a close professional associate and film producer; Jacobs’s What a Way to Go! had originally been conceived as a vehicle for Monroe before her death. Bricusse also worked closely with George Axelrod, screenwriter of The Seven Year Itch and Bus Stop, two films central to the construction of Monroe’s enduring screen image.
Marilyn Monroe; born Norma Jeane Mortenson (1926-1962) was an American actress, model and singer. Known for playing comic "blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era's sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million (equivalent to $2 billion in 2024) by the time of her death in 1962. Long after her death, Monroe remains a pop culture icon. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her as the sixth-greatest female screen legend from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Nachem Malech Mailer (1923-2007) known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, and filmmaker. In a career spanning over six decades, Mailer had eleven best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II. Mailer's 1973 biography of Monroe (usually designated Marilyn: A Biography) was not approached as a traditional biography. Mailer read the available biographies, watched Monroe's films, and looked at photographs of Monroe; for the rest of it, Mailer stated, "I speculated."
A particularly handsome copy of the deluxe signed issue, uniting Norman Mailer’s celebrated meditation on Marilyn Monroe with Lawrence Schiller’s photographic and editorial contribution - a lavish monument to Hollywood’s most enduring icon.
From the collection of Leslie Bricusse.
Price: $450.00