On Thursday, April 28, 2005, Norman Mailer was in Austin to announce the sale of his archive to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas for $2.5 million. The Society reported his visit from the Associated Press wire:
Even as researchers begin organizing his legacy, author Norman Mailer continues to weigh in on everything from the Iraq war to capital punishment. Mailer, 82, spoke Thursday at the University of Texas, which earlier this week announced it had purchased the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist’s archive for $2.5 million.
Mailer, whose works include “The Naked and the Dead,” and “The Executioner’s Song,” recalled being a young writer in the 1950s and said he might have been a blogger if there had been an Internet back then.
“In the ’50s, you couldn’t get anything interesting published,” he said.
Mailer said he chose the university’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center to house his archive because of its world-class reputation and because of his feeling of kinship to Texas, where he was stationed in the in the Army before shipping out to fight in World War II. Later, in the 1960s, he lectured at UT.
The collection includes manuscripts, notebooks, photographs and thousands of other materials, said Michael Lennon, an English professor at Wilkes University who has helped Mailer organize the materials.
Unpublished works include screenplays, short stories and a novel, “No Percentage,” written when Mailer was a student at Harvard University. Also included are two stories “Adventures of Bob and Paul” and “The Martian Invasion” written when Mailer was 8 and 11, respectively.
There are also files from his accountants and lawyers and old report cards, tax returns and car repair bills.
“What’s going to come back to haunt me?” Mailer joked.
Being in Texas, the state that has carried out the most executions since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Mailer tried to explain his “left-conservative” position on capital punishment.
“It’s a dangerous business to allow truly hideous criminals to live,” he said. But “if I had to choose, I’d say no capital punishment rather than huge capital punishment.”
Mailer’s “Executioner’s Song” was about the life and death of Gary Gilmore, who in 1977 became the first convict executed in the United States in a decade.
A string-saver’s archive
The papers had been saved, from the start, by Mailer’s mother. Fannie Mailer kept his notebooks, family photographs, canceled checks, and even the dogs’ identification tags; “her view was anything that emanated from Norman had value,” recalled Robert F. Lucid, a founding board member of the Society and then Mailer’s authorized biographer. In 1968 she and Lucid rented space in a Midtown Manhattan high-rise to hold the growing archive. By the time of The Executioner’s Song, whose research alone filled twenty-three boxes, it had outgrown the room, and in the early 1990s the cartons went to West Pittston, Pennsylvania, where J. Michael Lennon began cataloging them. “If it weren’t for Mike Lennon and Bob Lucid,” Mailer said, “my papers would be moldering in cartons on a wet cellar floor.” Lennon called him a “string-saver.”
What went to Texas filled nearly 500 boxes weighing more than 20,000 pounds: about 25,000 letters kept in carbon and on disk, among them more than a hundred wartime letters to his first wife, Beatrice, that became the backbone of The Naked and the Dead; the unpublished Harvard novel No Percentage; a dozen finished screenplays; mail he received at Bellevue; research for Harlot’s Ghost; notes on the campaigns of Henry Wallace, John F. Kennedy, and George McGovern; the files of his 1969 run for mayor; and thick files on Muhammad Ali, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Marilyn Monroe. Asked how it felt to crate up his life, Mailer, who had nine children, answered that it reminded him a bit of sending them off to college (Douglas Brinkley, “Mailer’s Miscellany,” New York Times, April 26, 2005).
Why Texas
Mailer gave more than one reason. In the South Pacific he had been assigned, on Leyte, to the 112th Cavalry, where many of his fellow soldiers were Texans and he “learned a good bit about Texas and Texans”; “the largest part” of his decision, though, was the Ransom Center’s standing as one of the finest collections of American literary archives (Brinkley). The AP’s account above, that he was stationed in Texas before shipping out, differs from his own: he went overseas from an artillery training unit at Fort Bragg. To the Los Angeles Times he called the Center “the greatest collection of literary archives to be found in America,” and its director, Thomas F. Staley, called the papers “the Platonic conception of what an archive should be” (Lianne Hart, Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2005). The Center had recently acquired the papers of James Jones, Don DeLillo, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Leon Uris; the bookseller Glenn Horowitz brokered the sale. “Scholars writing on recent America will need to make a pilgrimage to Austin,” he said (Brinkley). The sale drew wide coverage, which Works and Days records year by year.
The Norman Mailer Papers
The Ransom Center’s staff processed the collection from 2005 to 2007, and Mailer kept sending material in the years after the sale. Today the Norman Mailer Papers (MS-02643) run to 957 document boxes, 44 oversize boxes, 47 galley files, and 14 note-card boxes, some 420 linear feet, with 11,208 electronic files, from 1919 to 2006. Correspondence alone fills 223 boxes. The papers also hold manuscripts by others, among them Norris Church Mailer and Lennon, and the computer files of Judith McNally, his assistant and researcher from 1978, released to the Center after her death in 2006. About 1,200 of Mailer’s reference books went to Austin with the papers; the rest of his library went to the Norman Mailer Center and, in time, to Wilkes University (J. Michael Lennon, “The Naked and the Read,” 2018).
The Society in Austin
The papers soon made Austin a destination for the Society. In 2009 the Center shared Mailer’s research for Of a Fire on the Moon for the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 and restored his first film for its premiere at the New York Film Festival (Mailer in the News, 2009). In November 2011 the Society met at the Ransom Center itself, jointly with the James Jones Society, whose author’s papers are there too (Conference 2011). The Society’s Barry Leeds Travel Fund, established in 2015, has offered an award to scholars traveling to Austin to study the Mailer papers. Other archives have joined them: in 2013 the Center acquired the papers of Barbara Probst Solomon, a lifelong friend of Mailer’s, whose correspondence includes letters and materials relating to his life and work (2013).
In Works and Days
- The Naked and the Dead — Mailer’s debut novel, a 721-page Pacific-theater war novel published by Rinehart on 6 May 1948, 62 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, Pulitzer-nominated, and…
- The Executioner’s Song — Mailer’s 1,056-page ’true life novel’ of the Utah murderer Gary Gilmore, built from over 15,000 pages of interviews assembled by Lawrence Schiller; Little, Brown, 15…
- Gary Gilmore — Utah murderer (1940-1977) who killed two men in July 1976 and, refusing to appeal, was executed by firing squad on 17 January 1977 — the first US execution after the…