In the Village Voice archive article “Norman Mailer Runs for Mayor,” Joe Flaherty chronicles the novelist’s unlikely 1969 bid for Mayor of New York City in the Democratic primary, with columnist Jimmy Breslin as his running mate. The piece conveys the campaign’s origins in a gathering of New York writers and activists debating Mailer’s entry into politics—among them Pete Hamill, Flo Kennedy, Jerry Rubin, and Gloria Steinem—alongside Mailer’s own declaration that the city needed a “hip coalition of the right and the left” to confront its crises.
Mailer and Breslin proposed imaginative, if impractical, solutions to urban problems—most famously the secession of New York City into a 51st state with “power to the neighborhoods” at its core—and openly derided the political establishment, with Mailer describing the city as a “cancer and leprosy ward” and Breslin dismissing opponents as “bums.” Their campaign, while earnest in its critique of conventional municipal politics, culminated in a distant fourth‑place finish in the primary, but the article preserves the spectacle and seriousness of Mailer’s attempt to translate his literary provocation into civic action.