1961

Mailer's year of legal limbo and intellectual recovery — indicted (January) and arraigned for the November 1960 stabbing of Adele Morales, pleading guilty on 4 May, and given a suspended sentence with three years' probation on 13 November. Separates from Adele in March; meets Lady Jeanne Campbell at Gore Vidal's New York apartment that same month. The Y.M.H.A. closes the curtain on his February reading; Esquire prints his protest letter; he reviews Genet's The Blacks in The Voice and is answered by Lorraine Hansberry; debuts at Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Playboy; takes a London press tour for the André Deutsch British edition of Advertisements for Myself (with The Time of Her Time censored); ends the year in Austin and writes the first of his many forewords for other writers.

January — Esquire protest, Time letter, indictment

January — Esquire prints Mailer’s letter to the editor “A Farewell to His Honor” (61.1) — his complaint about the magazine’s handling of “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”: the title change to “Supermart,” the use of an old, unflattering photograph, the editorial headlines inserted between sections.

20 January — Time prints Mailer’s reply to its 2 January characterization of him as a “cop hater”: the role, he writes, is “too small,” and being a cop lover is “cancer gulch” (61.2).

31 January — A New York Post reporter informs Mailer of his indictment for felonious assault on Adele Morales; he will not comment on the case but, asked whether it is affecting his writing, says: “I really couldn’t say if this is affecting the writing. I don’t think about it — except on certain days” (61.2a).

February — Y.M.H.A. incident, Mademoiselle interview

February — Mademoiselle publishes a substantial Auchincloss–Lynch interview with Mailer on existentialism and the racial politics of “The White Negro” (61.3).

6 February — Mailer reads at the 92nd Street Y.M.H.A. An administrator orders the curtain down when he reads poems judged obscene. Mailer answers: “an administrator is no judge of literature.” Allen Ginsberg is in the audience and defends him (61.3a; 61.3b in Time’s mocking “People” column ten days later).

March — separation, Lady Jeanne Campbell

The marriage to Adele ends; the couple separate. At Gore Vidal‘s New York apartment, Mailer meets Lady Jeanne Campbell — daughter of the eleventh Duke of Argyll, granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook — who will become his third wife in 1962, and the dedicatee of Deaths for the Ladies (“To Jean (sic) Campbell”) (JML Days revised, 2-26-17).

Spring — DeMott article

In the spring 1961 American Scholar, Benjamin DeMott publishes “An Unprofessional Eye … Docket No. 15883” (61.3c) — a substantive essay containing quotations from the court records on the stabbing found nowhere else in the contemporaneous record.

April — JFK/Castro open letter; Voice front page

April — Mailer’s Rogue interview “Angry Young Rebel with a Cause” (61.4) appears.

27 April — The Village Voice gives its front page to “An Open Letter to JFK and Fidel Castro” (61.5) — Mailer’s paired letters, the Castro letter finished in November 1960 and the Kennedy letter in April 1961. The piece had been refused by the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and the Post before The Voice took it; the City Lights Journal for the Protection of All Beings No. 1 (“Love-Shot Issue”) reprinted it later in the year.

May — guilty plea; The Blacks; Baldwin’s reply

4 May — Mailer pleads guilty before a New York court to felonious assault on Adele. “I feel I did a lousy, dirty, cowardly thing,” he tells the bench. Sentencing is postponed six months; he is placed on probation. His attorney, Joseph Brill, calls him “a genius” whose “contribution to the culture of our civilization should not be impaired for even a minute.” The judge: “I intend to gamble on you” (61.5a, New York Mirror, 11 May). The Mirror’s 11 May report is the closest contemporaneous account of the plea. (Both the JML Days revised RTF and Lennon’s published Days (p. 13) compress this as “In March, he pleads guilty”; the 4 May date in the Works register, citing the New York Mirror of 11 May 1961 (61.5a), is followed here. The discrepancy is now seen to be internal to Lennon’s own published work — between Days entry (March) and Works register (4 May). A scholarly check against the Mirror archive or the NYC criminal-court records (Docket No. 15883, referenced in 61.3c) could resolve which sequence is correct: a March arraignment followed by a 4 May plea, or a March plea reported retrospectively by the Mirror on 4 May. Held to backlog.)

11 May / 18 May — The Voice runs Mailer’s two-part review of Jean Genet‘s The Blacks (61.6). On 1 June, Lorraine Hansberry attacks the review in the Voice; on 8 June Mailer answers (61.7).

May — Esquire publishes James Baldwin‘s “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy”, the most searching contemporary reply to “The White Negro” (57.1) — Baldwin reads Mailer’s hipster as a white fantasy of Black life. Collected the same year in Nobody Knows My Name (Dial).

July — Hemingway dies; Playboy debut

2 July — Ernest Hemingway commits suicide; Mailer is quoted on Papa’s legacy in the Aronowitz–Hamill compilation Ernest Hemingway: The Life and Death of a Man (Lancer, 1961; 61.22a).

July — Mailer’s debut in Playboy, the substantial symposium contribution “Sex and Censorship in Literature and the Arts” (61.8).

27 July — The Voice prints Mailer’s reply to Richard Grossman (61.9), whose 20 July letter had complained of too much Voice coverage of Mailer, James Baldwin, and Seymour Krim.

Summer–Fall — Paris Review debut

In Paris Review no. 26 (summer–fall 1961) appears “The First Day’s Interview” (61.10) — Mailer’s first piece in the magazine and his first published self-interview. Prompted by his interest in the life and work of Pablo Picasso, the piece is the seed of a triptych he would complete with “The Metaphysics of the Belly” and “The Political Economy of Time” in Cannibals and Christians (66.11).

September — New Yorker debut; British AFM

16 September — Mailer’s first appearance in The New Yorker, the poem “Gourmandise” (61.11).

28 September — W.J. Weatherby’s interview “The Pursuit of Experience” runs in the Manchester Guardian Weekly (61.12).

29 September — André Deutsch publishes the British edition of Advertisements for Myself (59.13). On legal advice, the second part of “The Time of Her Time” (twenty of twenty-six pages) is dropped. Mailer’s 400-word postscript (61.15) names the censorship and challenges British writers to fight it. The New Statesman the same day runs Wollheim’s interview “Living Like Heroes” (61.13) and Mailer’s poem “To the Lower Classes” (61.14).

November — London press tour; sentencing; second New Yorker poem; Austin

3 November — TV Times (London) runs “TV Violence? It’s a Sedative” (61.18) — Mailer assails British television for being too “sober” and “serious.”

11 November — A second New Yorker poem of the year, “Eternities” (61.19).

13 November — Mailer receives a suspended sentence for the felonious assault on Adele and is placed on probation for three years (JML Days revised, 2-26-17; 61.20). Asked for comment: “I feel singularly inarticulate today.”

November — Two article-interviews from the Deutsch London press conference: Peter Underwood’s in British Books (61.16) and W.G. Smith’s in Books and Bookmen (61.17).

23 November — The Voice prints Mailer’s “Open Poem to John Fitzgerald Kennedy” (61.21) — the third of his addresses to JFK in 1961. The same day, The Listener prints Michael Swain’s “The Spoken Word: Good Talkers” (61.21a) on Mailer’s BBC conversation with Colin MacInnes on religion and existentialism.

December — Texas Observer; Krim foreword

15 December — Winston Bode’s article-interview “Norman Mailer in Austin” runs in the Texas Observer (61.22), documenting Mailer’s University of Texas visit on politics, civil rights, and poetry.

December — Mailer writes the foreword to Seymour Krim‘s essay collection Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer (Excelsior, December 1961; 61.23) — his first foreword, preface, or introduction to a book by another writer, a form he would return to often.

Year-end note: contributing editor at Dissent

Per the ProjectMailer summary in Norman Mailer_ Important Dates.md, Mailer’s tenure as a contributing editor at Dissent — held since 1953 — ends in 1961. (Important Dates.md otherwise has no 1961 entry; it jumps from 1960 directly to 1962.)

Referenced by 40

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Days

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Cite as: /days/1961
Last updated: 2026-07-02