Holt has acquired award-winning journalist and screenwriter Stephen Schiff’s forthcoming biography on Norman Mailer. Schiff was critic-at-large for Vanity Fair from 1983 to 1992, where he met and wrote for Steve Rubin, president and publisher of Holt, who acquired world rights to the untitled work. Schiff, who first profiled Mailer in the October 1987 issue of Vanity Fair, was also a staff writer at the New Yorker, and has profiled some of the world’s best known novelists, artists and filmmakers, including V.S. Naipaul, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Steven Sondheim, and Muriel Spark.
Holt said the Mailer biography “will illuminate the large, rich and chaotic life of this most talked about — and tutted about — novelist, journalist, and celebrity of his age.” Said Rubin, “No writer in the twentieth century lived more fully than Mailer and Stephen Schiff is the writer to capture the drama and energy of that provocative life.”
Kathy Robbins at The Robbins Office, Inc. brokered the deal. The book will be edited by Holt executive editor Gillian Blake.
