At the age of 80, venerable literary figure Norman Mailer met a young writer, Dwayne Raymond, moonlighting as a waiter in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and hired him as his personal assistant. In the new book, Mornings with Mailer, Raymond recounts the four years they spent working together before Mailer’s death in 2007.

The author of more than 40 books, Norman Mailer was one of our country’s most distinguished writers. He was twice awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, first for The Armies of the Night (1968), and later for The Executioner’s Song (1979), and his first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) was named one of the best 100 English language novels by the Modern Library.

"Dwayne Raymond adds another dimension to our appreciation of a great man's genius, the paradoxes of his genial belligerence, his obstinacy at once maddening and endearing, and his unaffected originality,” says Harry Evans, the bestselling author of They Made America. “This is a fascinating touching memoir, and often funny too.”

Raymond worked with Mailer on a daily basis on both personal and professional matters, and provided editorial assistance on his last four published works. They eventually became close friends, and remained so up until Mailer’s passing. “Raymond provides an intimate look at the daily routine of a great writer in the last years of his life,” explains Pulitzer Prize-winner Doris Kearns Goodwin, “[He] poignantly describes how Mailer fought like a lion to continue writing even as age and illness slowed him down.” Mailer died of kidney failure in 2007.

Dwayne Raymond worked as Norman Mailer's personal assistant from April 2003 until Mailer’s death in November 2007. He provided editorial support for Mailer’s final four books. Raymond contributes regularly to the Huffington Post and has written for The New York Times Brief Guide to Essential Knowledge, The Mirror, In Newsweekly, and The Boston Reader. He was a writer and producer for NBC and an associate producer for MTV. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.