Overview

The Norman Mailer American Literature and Society Travel Study Program

For generations, American novels such as The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, The Call of the Wild, The Sun Also Rises, Invisible Man, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Moby Dick, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have captured the imagination of the world and helped define what it means to be American and human.

Now for the first time, aspiring writers and scholars from Asia and India will be able to embark on a journey across America, tracing the footsteps of the literary giants who authored these works. The participants will study the culture, society and settings that have given life to characters like Jay Gatsby, Huck Finn, Herzog, and Captain Ahab.

The Norman Mailer American Literature and Society Travel Study Program will begin in the late summer of 2011. In the first year of the program, this unique study tour will focus on America’s greatest fiction writers: Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London, Edith Wharton, John Steinbeck, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Ellison, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Thomas Wolfe, and Norman Mailer. Students and writers from India and Asia will travel to the homes, neighborhoods, and towns where each of these writers lived, accompanied by scholars who know their works well. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity will prove to be an unrivalled source of education and inspiration, a window into American history, culture and society.

In each succeeding year, the American Literature and Society Travel Study Program will focus on a different genre of literature – 2012: non-fiction, 2013: poetry, 2014: drama – studying leading authors in each category. In 2015, a second round will begin with fiction.  

The Norman Mailer Center, a non-profit organization for educational purposes, honors renowned American writer Norman Mailer and his lifelong interest and commitment to writers and writing.