Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery is a 1995 non-fiction book by Norman Mailer, ISBN 0-679-42535-7. It amounts to a detailed biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of US President John F. Kennedy. The book includes an exhaustive examination of his movements in the years, and particularly in the months, leading up to Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, and Oswald's own death two days later. Knitted into the story of Oswald's life are Mailer's suppositions on his state of mind and motivations. The Oswald that Mailer depicts is a single-minded and vain individual convinced of his own destiny and importance who suffers a series of defeats and frustrations, and who killed the President in a desperate search for achievement.
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“In the tale proper—where there is no space for development of character or for great profusion and variety of incident—mere construction is, of course, far more imperatively demanded than in the novel.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)