"Mailer wrote almost 50,000 letters over the course of his life, keeping a copy of almost every one of them. He corresponded with presidents and politicians, artists and athletes, writers and editors, students, antagonists, fans, friends, his children, [and] his loves, including his beloved sixth wife, Norris Church Mailer. Here are the letters of a precocious sixteen-year-old arriving from Brooklyn at Harvard. Here are the letters depicting the horrors of the war in the Pacific from a soldier's point of view. Here are the letters describing a young writer's struggle with his first novel ... And here are the many, many letters of a man who spent sixty years in the spotlight"--