2021
A year of Mailer's afterlife. His sister Barbara Mailer Wasserman publishes her memoir Love of My Life at ninety-four; Maggie McKinley edits the essay collection Norman Mailer in Context; and a Boston Globe column revisits Mailer's coinage 'factoid.'
A year of Mailer’s afterlife — in family memoir, in scholarship, and in the language he left behind.
Family memoir
At ninety-four, Mailer’s younger sister Barbara Mailer Wasserman publishes her first book, the memoir Love of My Life — a portrait of their Depression-era Brooklyn childhood and of her own life from postwar Paris to 1950s Greenwich Village. The novelist and playwright Ron Fried reviews it warmly at Head Butler (7 November).
Scholarship
Maggie McKinley edits Norman Mailer in Context (Cambridge University Press, 26 August), a multi-author collection placing Mailer’s work in its literary and historical frameworks — the register’s first edited scholarly essay collection.
In the language
On 23 July Alex Beam‘s Boston Globe column “Just the fact(oid)s, please” revisits Mailer’s coinage factoid, minted in Marilyn (1973) and long since turned to the opposite of his meaning. Earlier, on 15 March, Ralph Keyes had surveyed both that coinage and fug — the bowdlerism forced on The Naked and the Dead — in a Literary Hub essay on writers’ invented words.
Reassessments and deaths
In May, Tomiwa Owolade revisited The Prisoner of Sex in UnHerd. The year also saw the deaths of two figures from Mailer’s world: the biographer Peter Manso, author of the 1985 oral biography Mailer, died on 7 April at eighty; and the critic and cultural historian Morris Dickstein died in March at eighty-one.