The Executioner's Song

The Executioner's Song (1979) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Norman Mailer that depicts the events related to the execution of Gary Gilmore for murder by the state of Utah. It was a finalist for the 1980 National Book Award. The title of the book may be a play on "The Lord High Executioner's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. "The Executioner's Song" is also the title of a poem by Mailer, published in Fuck You magazine in September 1964 and reprinted in Cannibals and Christians (1966).