The Executioner's Song
by Norman Mailer
Summary
Gary Gilmore comes out of federal prison in April 1976, aged thirty five, having spent most of his life inside, and goes to live with relatives in Provo, Utah. He gets a job. He buys a truck on credit. He meets Nicole Baker, who is nineteen with two children and a hard history of her own, and for a few weeks they are intensely happy. Within three months he has shot dead a petrol station attendant and a motel manager, neither of whom resisted him, for a few hundred dollars.
Then the part that made him famous. Sentenced to death, Gilmore refused to appeal, fired the lawyers who tried on his behalf, and demanded that Utah get on with it. No one in the United States had been executed in a decade. He and Nicole attempted suicide together. The press arrived, then the rights dealers, then the injunctions, and on 17 January 1977 he sat in a chair in a warehouse and a firing squad shot him.
Mailer tells it in more than a thousand pages of very short, flat sentences taken almost entirely from the voices of the people involved, and he stays out of it completely, which from Mailer is the real surprise. The first half belongs to Utah and the second to the reporters, lawyers and producers who turned a man into a property.
It is easy to read and hard to put down, and the accumulation is the argument: nobody here is explicable and everybody is documented.
Best for readers who want the great American book about capital punishment and the industry that grew around it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Executioner's Song won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which looks odd, since every word of it is sourced from interviews, transcripts and letters. Norman Mailer called it a true life novel and the board took him at his word, showing the same latitude it had used in giving Roots a special award in 1977.
Lawrence Schiller did the reporting first. He had bought the rights to Gilmore's story and conducted the interviews, and he brought Mailer in. Schiller then appears in the second half of the book as a character, buying access to the story the reader is holding. He also directed the 1982 television film from Mailer's screenplay, with Tommy Lee Jones winning an Emmy as Gilmore.
Gilmore's death ended a pause of nearly ten years in which nobody in the United States had been executed, and opened the era that followed the Supreme Court's restoration of the death penalty in 1976. His younger brother Mikal Gilmore, a music journalist, wrote the family's side of it in Shot in the Heart in 1994.