1960

The year that turns. In November Mailer publishes "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (60.9), his admiring portrait of John F. Kennedy at the Los Angeles convention and the first of his political-convention narratives — an early, important precursor to the New Journalism. Weeks later, in the early morning of 20 November, after a party at the West 94th Street apartment meant to launch a run for mayor of New York, he stabs his wife Adele with a penknife and is committed to Bellevue for seventeen days. The mayoral run collapses; he will not actually run until 1969.

Norman and Adele Mailer, 1960

A year in print

Beyond the convention narrative, 1960 brings the Dissent symposium piece “A Program for the Nation” (60.1), the juvenile-delinquency essay “Brooklyn Minority Report” (60.5) in Esquire, the Shiny Enemies letter answering Gore Vidal (60.3), and the publication of “Excerpts from ‘The Deer Park’” (60.4) in Seymour Krim’s anthology The Beats. The Provincetown drunk-driving affair of the summer generates its own small literature (60.6–60.8), capped by Dwight Macdonald‘s New Yorker essay “Massachusetts vs. Mailer” (60.8).

25 May — National Institute of Arts and Letters

25 May — Mailer receives a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters; sources differ on whether it was a grant or an award (Important Dates calls it a grant).

Summer — the convention and Provincetown

In July Mailer covers the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles for Esquire, writing “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” in Provincetown that July–August. The same summer, a Provincetown arrest for drunkenness leads to a 23 June court appearance and acquittal, which Mailer corrects publicly in “A Letter from Provincetown” (60.7).

Autumn — the move and the narrative

In September the Mailers move to an apartment at 250 West 94th Street in Manhattan. During the year Mailer also purchases the four-story brownstone at 142 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights, into which the family will move in 1962 and where he will live, off and on, for the rest of his life.

18 October — “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” appears in the November Esquire (under the editor-imposed title “Superman Comes to the Supermart”), three weeks before the election.

November — Birdland, Brown, and the stabbing

14–15 November — Mailer is arrested at the New York jazz club Birdland in a dispute over a credit card and bar tab; the incident is reported in the New York Times on 15 November (60.10) and resolved when the charge is dropped on 20 December (60.11).

17 November — Speaking at Brown University on literature, politics, metaphysics, and sex — “I come to you to bring the existentialist word” — Mailer announces, “I’m running for mayor of New York next year”.

20 November — At approximately 5 a.m., after an all-night party at the 250 West 94th Street apartment intended to celebrate the mayoral candidacy, Mailer stabs Adele twice with a small penknife; she undergoes major surgery at University Hospital on Second Avenue. Sources disagree on the date: the Works register and JML’s Days place the stabbing in the early morning of 20 November (the party having run from the night of the 19th), while Important Dates dates it 19 November.

21–22 November — Mailer is arrested (60.10c) and, after protesting a psychiatric diagnosis of “an acute paranoid breakdown with delusional thinking,” is committed by a magistrate to the violent ward of Bellevue Hospital for observation (60.10d, 60.10f, 60.10g). He protested: “If this happens, for the rest of my life my work will be considered as the work of a man with a disordered mind.”

December — release

8 December — Mailer is released after seventeen days at Bellevue (22 November–8 December). Adele declines to press charges; the felony indictment and its resolution (a suspended sentence and probation) follow in 1961 (see 61.2a).

Referenced by 27

Works

Letters

Days

People

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Last updated: 2026-05-25