Barry H. Leeds, Distinguished Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University and one of the founders of the Norman Mailer Society, died on April 15, 2015. He was 74, and lived in Bristol, Connecticut.
He thought of himself first and foremost as a teacher. His career in the classroom spanned more than half a century—at colleges and universities in New York City, Athens, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, and then for 47 years at Central Connecticut, from January 1968 on. The university gave him its Distinguished Service Award in 1981, and that fall, after his death, his department gathered faculty, students, and alumni to share stories of an exemplary teacher, scholar, and mentor.
The first Mailer scholar
Leeds wrote the first book-length study of Mailer’s work, The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer (New York University Press, 1969), and returned to him in The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer (2002). Along the way he wrote a study of Ken Kesey and more than two hundred articles, and he became Mailer’s friend and a recurring interviewer. In their 1988 conversation for the Connecticut Review, later collected in Conversations with Norman Mailer, Mailer gave his fullest account of why he abandoned the trilogy that Ancient Evenings was to have begun. In 1996 Leeds looked back on thirty years of meetings and letters in “Mailer and Me,” and in 2014 he published a candid memoir, A Moveable Beast: Scenes from My Life, with chapters on Norman and Norris Church Mailer.
A founder of the Society
When the Society first met, in Cambridge on May 22, 2003, it was Barry Leeds who put forward the slate of interim officers, with J. Michael Lennon as president and himself as vice president (minutes). He served as vice president from the Society’s founding until his death, introduced the screening of Tough Guys Don’t Dance at the 2004 conference, and sat on the editorial board of The Mailer Review. His work on Mailer the man and Mailer the artist remains one of the pillars of Mailer scholarship.
To honor his scholarship and his generous friendship, the Society established the Barry Leeds Travel Fund, which helps students attend the annual conference, with a founding gift from his daughter, Dr. Ashley Leeds.
In Works and Days
- Barry H. Leeds — the first book-length study of Mailer, and a friend and recurring interviewer.
- Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988), which collects the Connecticut Review conversation
- “Mailer and Me” (1996), his memoir of thirty years with Mailer