1999
A year of interviews, tributes, and political journalism between books. Mailer reflects on his Paris and Manhattan youth, gives Christopher Busa his fullest interview on Provincetown, and writes a Washington Post op-ed against the Kosovo bombing. The decade's biographies culminate in Mary Dearborn's Mailer: A Biography, the fourth full-length life, and Norman Podhoretz's bitter memoir Ex-Friends. Mailer says he is at last ready to write the Harlot's Ghost sequel.
Looking back, and a Kosovo op-ed
Between books, Mailer spent 1999 in retrospective interviews — on the Manhattan of his youth for his son Michael (99.0), on postwar Paris (with Richard Wilbur and Robert Lucid) for the Paris Review (99.2), on the genesis of The Time of Our Time with J. Michael Lennon (99.4), and, most fully, on what Provincetown meant to him as an artist in Christopher Busa‘s “Interview with Norman Mailer” (99.5). In May he returned to political journalism with the Washington Post op-ed “Milosevic and Clinton” (99.3), attacking the Kosovo bombing campaign. He also paid tribute to Vance Bourjaily (99.1, recalling his 1952 meeting with James Jones) and offered a short essay on “Audacity” (99.2a), naming Ancient Evenings his most audacious novel.
The biographers close in
The decade’s run of Mailer biographies culminated in Mary Dearborn‘s Mailer: A Biography (99.8), the fourth full-length life, for which he again declined to be interviewed and which he disputed (99.7). His estranged friend Norman Podhoretz devoted a bitter chapter of his memoir Ex-Friends (99.9a) to their broken friendship. In a December New York Observer piece Mailer weighed in on the Giuliani–Brooklyn Museum “Sensation” dispute and on Hillary Clinton’s Senate run (99.7). He twice reprised his list of favorite books (99.10, 99.11), and told Rolling Stone that the Cold War’s quiet end had left Americans feeling “cheated” (99.9).