2022
A posthumous year on the approach to the Mailer centennial. It opens with the 'Cancel Mailer' controversy after Random House drops a planned centenary essay collection; the TLS prints the first selection from the 'Lipton's Journal' in August; and in November two centenary books appear — J. Michael Lennon's Mailer's Last Days and Robert J. Begiebing's Norman Mailer at 100.
A posthumous year, on the eve of the centennial.
January–March — the “Cancel Mailer” controversy
The year opened with a literary controversy. Michael Wolff reported in The Ankler (“Was Norman Mailer Canceled?”) that Random House had dropped a planned centenary collection of Mailer’s essays, reportedly after a junior staffer objected to “The White Negro.” A wave of commentary followed: Neal Pollack, Tomiwa Owolade, Geoff Shullenberger, Tim Black, Peter Dreier, David Walsh, David Klion, and Darryl Pinckney, with two pieces from Mailer’s son Michael Mailer (and again in the Boston Globe). Mailer’s sister, Barbara Mailer Wasserman, was interviewed on WVIA’s ArtScene in February.
August
August 19 — The Times Literary Supplement prints “Saint and Psychopath,” the first published selection from Mailer’s mid-1950s “Lipton’s Journal,” edited by J. Michael Lennon, Gerald R. Lucas, and Susan Mailer — a trailer for the full edition that would appear in 2024.
November
November 15 — J. Michael Lennon publishes Mailer’s Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature (Etruscan Press).
November 23 — Robert J. Begiebing publishes Norman Mailer at 100: Conversations, Correlations, Confrontations (Louisiana State University Press), which would win the Robert F. Lucid Award for Mailer Studies.
Related pages
- 2021 | 2023
- Saint and Psychopath | Mailer's Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature | Norman Mailer at 100: Conversations, Correlations, Confrontations