The Executioner's Song

The Executioner's Song is a true crime novel by the American writer Norman Mailer, published in 1979. It depicts the events surrounding the execution of Gary Gilmore by the state of Utah.

Gilmore robbed two men in 1976 and killed them, and after being tried and convicted he immediately insisted on being executed for his crimes, which put him in conflict with a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after he had stopped wanting to be. The book follows the course of his life up to the killings and the arguments that surrounded what came afterwards, and it appeared at a moment when the United States was deciding how capital punishment would work following the Supreme Court's decision in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. Gilmore became the first person to be executed in the country after the death penalty was reinstated. Mailer's account of him, and of the anguish created by the murders, was part of the national argument about that revival, and the title may be a play on the Lord High Executioner's song from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.

Mailer had published both novels and long works of reportage before this one, and at the time it came out the debate over capital punishment in the United States was very much alive.