The Executioner's Song

Gary Gilmore was a convicted murderer who was executed by firing squad in Utah in January 1977, becoming the first person to be put to death in the United States after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 (in the Gregg v. Georgia decision). His insistence on being executed—waiving his appeals—made his case a national media sensation.

Yes, Norman Mailer won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for 'The Executioner's Song,' which is classified as a novel despite its journalistic, heavily researched true-crime narrative. Mailer had previously won the Pulitzer for 'The Armies of the Night' in 1969, making him a two-time recipient.

Mailer relied heavily on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted by his collaborator Lawrence Schiller, who gained extraordinary access to Gilmore, his girlfriend Nicole Baker, and numerous other figures in Utah. Mailer then shaped this raw material into an exhaustive, novelistic narrative of over 1,000 pages, told largely in the voices of its subjects.

Yes, a television miniseries adaptation aired in 1982, directed by Lawrence Schiller and starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmore and Rosanna Arquette as Nicole Baker. Jones won an Emmy for his performance, and the production was praised for its unflinching fidelity to the grim events described in Mailer's book.