FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Norman Mailer Society Awards 2015 Robert F. Lucid Award to Kevin M. Schultz
The Norman Mailer Society is pleased to announce that the 2015 Robert F. Lucid Award for the best book in Mailer studies has been awarded to Kevin M. Schultz for Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties (W. W. Norton & Company).
Presented annually, the Robert F. Lucid Award recognizes the most outstanding and consequential contribution to scholarship on Norman Mailer. The Society’s award committee selected Buckley and Mailer for its rigorous archival research, analytical depth, and narrative clarity, as well as for its appeal to both scholarly and general readers.
In this study, Professor Schultz offers the first sustained examination of the complex intellectual and personal relationship between Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley Jr. By situating their interactions within the broader political, cultural, and media landscapes of the 1960s, Schultz vividly reconstructs the figures, debates, and events that defined the era. The committee further noted the book’s timely and incisive reflections on the transformation of American political discourse, a theme of enduring relevance. Buckley and Mailer presents Mailer in newly detailed focus at a pivotal moment in American cultural history.
Kevin M. Schultz is an award-winning historian and educator whose work focuses on American intellectual and cultural life. Born in Los Angeles, he has lived in Nashville, Utah, Berkeley, San Jose, San Francisco, and Charlottesville before settling in Chicago, where he teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His scholarship explores the circulation, adaptation, and contestation of ideas in American culture, and his writing has appeared in both academic and popular venues.