What the Society noticed about Mailer in 2008: books, films, articles, events, and the people around him. Each item links to its source where one survives.
June
- 20 — Provincetown Arts Press launches Blue Nights, photographs by George Hirose with an introduction by Mailer, one of the last things he wrote. Provincetown Arts
August
- 24 — Random House posts tributes to Mailer from the April 9 memorial at Carnegie Hall.
September
- 21 — Mailer appears in Inside the Handy Writers’ Colony, a documentary broadcast nationally on PBS on October 23.
October
- 6 — The New Yorker publishes a selection of Mailer’s letters on war and politics, from the Second World War to his last years: “In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.”
November
- 10 — The Washington Post opens J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI file on Mailer, begun after an Esquire piece that mocked Jacqueline Kennedy and kept for fifteen years: “The Mailer Files.”
- 13 — In the Huffington Post, Dwayne Raymond, Mailer’s last assistant, remembers voting with him in Provincetown in 2004: “On Voting with Norman Mailer.”
- 15 — Dwayne Raymond recalls Mailer’s views on marriage in a Huffington Post column on the marriage debate: “Marriage, Money, and LDS Possibilities.”
- 16 — Esquire’s “75 Books Every Man Should Read” puts The Naked and the Dead at number 25. Via Collected Miscellany.
- 19 — A Washington Post follow-up finds the FBI writing literary criticism of Mailer, judging his work “obscene and bitter.” Read the series.
- 19 — “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” (1960) is named one of “The 7 Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire.”
- 20 — Fresh from the Obama campaign, blogger Andrew Seal rereads Miami and the Siege of Chicago for Mailer’s prophecies about WASP power and the Republican Party: Blographia Literaria.
- 23 — Mailer’s 2007 interview is collected in The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 3, introduced by Margaret Atwood. Read the interview online.
- 26 — The Washington Post’s Mailer Files continue with the FBI’s reading of Mailer on the death of Marilyn Monroe: “Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?”
December
- 2 — The Village Voice reprints Mailer’s “Open Letter to JFK” on Cuba from its archives. Read it.
- 5 — Mailer is nominated for the first class of the Brooklyn Hall of Fame, and by January leads the public voting.
- 13 — Reviewing Frost/Nixon for Truthdig, Allen Barra credits Mailer, ahead of Vidal and Roth, with coming closest to Nixon’s psyche. Read the review.
- 23 — The ten-minute Maidstone brawl between Mailer and Rip Torn circulates online, with a transcript.
- 23 — Writer and musician Bruce Klauber recalls Mailer’s fiftieth-birthday party of February 1973: Jazz Legends.
- 23 — Charlie Rose’s archive gathers his conversations with Mailer from 1995 on.