Over a fifty-nine-year period, Mailer won two Pulitzer Prizes and had eleven books spend a total of 160 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Biographer J. Michael Lennon called Mailer the chronicler of the American Century,[2] and a talent whose career has "been at once so brilliant, varied, controversial, improvisational, public, productive, lengthy and misunderstood".

[3] Beginning in 1959, it became a habit of Mailer's to release his periodical writing, excerpts, and the occasional new piece in collections and miscellanies every few years.

[36] Not including letters, Mailer had written for over 100 magazines and periodicals, including Dissent, Ladies Home Journal, One: The Homosexual Magazine, Playboy, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Harper's, New Yorker, and others.

[37] By 1986, Mailer had been interviewed approximately 200 times, perhaps more than any other American author on a wide range of topics.