1990
A quiet year given almost entirely to writing Harlot's Ghost. Mailer surfaces mainly in interviews on sex and ego (Carole Mallory's 'The Power of Sex'; a Cosmopolitan self-interview), reads at a Provincetown benefit, and speaks on Hemingway — 'maybe the most competitive American writer who ever lived' — at a J.F.K. Library conference.
Nineteen-ninety was a year of comparative public quiet, given over almost entirely to the writing of Harlot’s Ghost (91.26). Mailer surfaced chiefly in interviews on sex, marriage, and ego — Carole Mallory‘s “The Power of Sex” in M: The Civilized Man (90.1, with his photograph on the cover) and a Cosmopolitan self-interview, “A Doctor Is No Better than His Patient” (90.3), one of his most detailed discussions of sexual matters. A letter to the critic Peter Balbert, reprinted in Studies in the Novel (90.2), explained the old “spoof” by which he had once passed off a passage of The Deer Park as D. H. Lawrence in a “Big Bite” column.
In August he read from his poems and from Tough Guys Don’t Dance at a Provincetown Art Association benefit (90.4), and at a Hemingway conference at the J.F.K. Library he called Hemingway “maybe the most competitive American writer who ever lived. And that is an enormous remark” (90.5).
