The Board of the Norman Mailer Society is saddened to share that Erik G.R. Nakjavani died on September 27, 2026, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Born in Tehran in 1934, Erik studied in London before coming to West Virginia University, where he met Jeanne, his wife of 65 years. He took his doctorate in comparative literature at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and taught comparative literature and French for 35 years at the University of Pittsburgh, first in Oakland and then at Pitt-Bradford, where he helped build the young campus. He retired as Professor Emeritus of Humanities.
His scholarly home was Hemingway. He was a founding member of the Hemingway Society. But his reading ranged across literary theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, music, and art, and that range brought him to Mailer. At our conferences he gave papers on Mailer’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis (Provincetown, 2015), on Mailer’s reading of Capital (Long Branch, 2016), and on the “limit situations” that recur in Hemingway and Mailer (Wilkes-Barre, 2019). Erik attended our conferences for many years, until age kept him home in the last few.
He was also one of The Mailer Review’s most faithful contributors. Between 2010 and 2021 he published eleven pieces in its pages, on Hemingway’s influence on Mailer, George Plimpton, Muhammad Ali, Mailer as an intellectual, and Susan Mailer’s memoir, among others. All are free to read at mailerreview.org.
Those of us who knew him remember a kind and generous man, curious about everything and grateful for the smallest help. He will be missed.
Erik is survived by Jeanne, his daughter Kirsten Nakjavani Bookmiller, his son-in-law Robert Bookmiller, and his grandson Sebastian Bookmiller. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that gifts be made in his name to The Loft Community Partnership or the Pet Pantry of Lancaster County.
[Erik’s full obituary is posted at Legacy.com. If you have a memory of Erik to share, please send it to us using the form below, and we will post it here. —Ed.]
Remembrances
I didn’t know Erik well, but I knew him to be a kind man. A couple of times I helped him with some tech trouble, small things, and he was so grateful that at the Sarasota conference he insisted on buying me a drink. He came to many of our conferences over the years, until age put a stop to his travels. He will be missed.
—Gerald R. Lucas