Norman Mailer: Works and Days

In Re: Sidney Hook

A short letter to the editor of Dissent in which Mailer declines to recant his "facetious" description of Sidney Hook — in "The Meaning of 'Western Defense'" (54.1) — as a "liberal-with-muscles."

“In Re: Sidney Hook.” Letter to the editor. Dissent 1 (summer 1954), 303.

Mailer refuses to recant his “facetious” description of Sidney Hook in “The Meaning of ‘Western Defense’” (54.1) as a “liberal-with-muscles.” He ends by saying that if Hook is “an almost lone philosophical defender of democratic socialist and humanist values, it makes me Leo Tolstoy”.

Lennon & Lennon: 54.2
Cite as: /letters/1954-summer-in-re-sidney-hook
Last updated: 2026-06-07