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.

Mailer’s engagement with true crime inevitably brought him into comparison and rivalry with Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood (1966) is often regarded as inaugurating the modern true crime genre. Capote described his book as a “nonfiction novel,” emphasizing its literary structure and psychological depth while insisting on its factual accuracy. The book’s immense commercial and critical success positioned Capote as the preeminent practitioner of literary true crime. Mailer viewed Capote’s style as overly aestheticized and emotionally distanced, criticizing Capote’s self-promotion and what he perceived as a narrowing of the moral and political stakes of crime writing. For Mailer, the true crime narrative was not merely an exploration of individual pathology but an opportunity to interrogate the American state, the media apparatus, and the cultural fascination with violence.

This difference in emphasis becomes clear when comparing In Cold Blood with The Executioner’s Song. Capote’s narrative centers intensely on the killers and their victims in rural Kansas, constructing a tightly controlled, almost classical tragedy. Mailer’s work, by contrast, expands outward to encompass the legal system, the press, the families of the condemned, and the shifting currents of public opinion. Mailer relied extensively on interviews, court transcripts, letters, and journalistic accounts. Rather than foregrounding his own authorial presence, as he often did in earlier nonfiction, he adopted a relatively restrained, third-person style. The narrative moves among multiple perspectives, presenting conversations and internal states with novelistic immediacy while maintaining a documentary foundation. This structural choice distinguishes the work from Capote’s more centralized narrative voice and reflects Mailer’s commitment to representing a broad social field.

In 1980, The Executioner’s Song won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. While the book received widespread critical praise, it also drew criticism for what some regarded as Mailer’s overly romanticized portrayal of Gilmore. In 1985, Alice Kaminsky published a lengthy critique, The Victim’s Song, arguing that such romanticization downplayed the severity of violent crimes. In 1994, Gary Gilmore’s brother Mikal Gilmore, a journalist at Rolling Stone, published his memoir, Shot in the Heart, in which he documents the long history of dysfunction that he believed shaped both his own and his brothers’ lives.