2005

Mailer, 82, sells his vast personal archive to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin — the year's central event, drawing wide press — while continuing his political-theological provocations (the Sartre-centenary essay, the Reagan/Bush 'God's chosen envoy' blog post) and looking back at his Provincetown years.

At eighty-two, living year-round in Provincetown, Mailer arranges the disposition of his life’s papers and keeps up a steady run of essays, interviews, and provocations.

January

The London Sunday Times runs “America and Its War with the Invisible Kingdom of Satan” (05.1); the same day Parade publishes “One Idea” (05.1a), with Mailer on the cover beside his granddaughter Natasha Lancaster.

Spring — the archive sale

In April Mailer sells his enormous personal archive to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, with his archivists J. Michael Lennon and Robert F. Lucid detailing its scope. The sale draws a wave of coverage — the New York Times (05.3), the Daily Texan (05.4), the Los Angeles Times (05.5), the AP wire (05.6), and later Ransom News (05.12) and Texas Monthly (05.13). In Stop Smiling he and John Buffalo Mailer hold their boxing conversation (05.2).

June

For the Sartre centenary Mailer publishes “Sartre’s God Problem” (05.7) in The Nation — prompting a later letter to the editor (05.11) — and posts his blunt Reagan obituary comment (05.8) to the Huffington Post, which draws Jay Rosen’s reply (05.8a). The career-retrospective Rolling Stone interview (05.9) with Douglas Brinkley appears at the end of the month, containing the disparaging remarks about Michiko Kakutani that would dog him.

Summer and after

Mailer looks back at his Provincetown decades in Cape Cod View (05.10). A letter appears in Malcolm Boyd‘s prayer anthology (05.14), and Lennon edits the limited-edition booklet Norman Mailer’s Provincetown (05.15). His book of conversations with John Buffalo, The Big Empty, is due from Nation Books in February 2006.

The Norman Mailer Society

November 5–6 — The Norman Mailer Society holds its 3rd annual conference in Provincetown. Conference program (PDF).

Related pages

• 2004 | 2006
• Harry Ransom Center | Sartre's God Problem | John Buffalo Mailer | Provincetown, Massachusetts
• America and Its War with the Invisible Kingdom of Satan (05.1) | One Idea (05.1a) | Mailer's Miscellany (05.3) | Mailer Gives Archives to Ransom Center (05.4) | Mailer's Vast Archives to Be Housed in Texas (05.5) | Mailer Archives in Texas (05.6) | Mailer's Papers Come to Texas (05.12) | You've Got Mailer (05.13) | Mailer v. Mailer: Norman Mailer Talks with His Son, John Buffalo Mailer, about the Sport of Boxing (05.2) | God and Man and Mailer (05.11) | God's Chosen Envoy for America (05.8) | Don't be a Blogger Manqué, Norman Mailer (05.8a) | Norman Mailer: The Last Buccaneer Looks Back (05.9) | The Write Place (05.10) | Norman Mailer's Provincetown: The Wild West of the East (05.15)

Cite as: /days/2005
Last updated: 2026-06-08