The inaugural issue of The Mailer Review contains an excerpt from Mr. Mailer’s unpublished 1942 play, “The Naked and the Dead”; sixteen of his letters from the 1950s; William Kennedy’s address to the 2006 Mailer Society conference; reviews of The Castle in the Forest by Robert Begiebing, Barbara Probst Solomon, Christopher Ricks and Phillip Sipiora; reproductions of a number of Mailer items from the collection of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin; a memoir by Mr. Mailer’s sister, Barbara Wasserman; an interview by Jeffrey Severs with Mailer’s long-time collaborator, Lawrence Schiller; an excerpt from the unfinished biography of Mailer by the late Robert F. Lucid; several critical essays and a lengthy bibliography. It is 272 pages in length and contains several photographs.
How the Review Began
The Review was the Society’s journal from the start, co-sponsored by the University of South Florida, which contributed $11,500 along with facilities and other resources. Its founding editor, Phillip Sipiora, brought the first issue in under its projected $10,500 budget and distributed it to attendees at the 2007 conference in Provincetown, crediting editors Gerald Lucas, Raymond Vince, and Constance Holmes. Its stated purpose was simple: to promote the legacy of Norman Mailer (minutes, 2007).
The second issue arrived a year later, earlier than the first, a large special edition of which half was memorial material after Mailer’s death in November 2007. J. Michael Lennon called the Review “a wonderful book that will be on shelves for Mailer scholars for a long time,” and the Society gave Sipiora its Robert F. Lucid Award, which he accepted on behalf of the team that made it (minutes, 2008).
The Mailer Review continues today at mailerreview.org, where every volume is free to read a year after publication.
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 Castle in the Forest — Mailer’s last completed novel: the boyhood of Adolf Hitler, narrated by Dieter, a minion of the Devil.
- Barbara Probst Solomon — American writer and journalist; a friend of Mailer who interviewed him in Provincetown in July 1981 for the Madrid daily El Pais, later reprinting the full conversation…
- Phillip Sipiora — Scholar of rhetoric, literature, and film; Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of South Florida and the founding editor of The Mailer Review.
- Lawrence Schiller — American photographer, producer, and director; Mailer’s most important collaborator, beginning when the two met in November 1972.
- Robert F. Lucid — Literary scholar (long at the University of Pennsylvania) who met Mailer while Mailer lectured at the University of Chicago in 1958 and became his archivist and…