Emerging in the late 1940s with The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer became associated with the movement often termed the New Journalism, a mode of nonfiction writing that blended novelistic techniques with factual reportage. Other prominent members of the New Journalism movement included Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Truman Capote.

Mailer’s relationship to true crime developed gradually. Although he was not initially known for crime reportage, his nonfiction works of the 1960s, including The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, demonstrated his interest in documentary immediacy and narrative immersion. These books blurred distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, employing reconstructed dialogue, shifting perspectives, and interior analysis. Such strategies proved crucial when Mailer turned to the case of Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer executed in Utah in 1977. Gary’s execution was historically significant as the first completed capital punishment in the United States after Gregg v. Georgia (1976) upheld the death penalty against Troy Leon Gregg. Mailer recognized that the case offered not merely a sensational crime story, but a lens through which to examine American attitudes toward capital punishment.