Letter to Willie Morris
Declining an article assignment from the new editor of Harper's: 'writing articles has a bit of drudgery to it for me, and now I'm free, for a year at least, to work on a novel.' Lennon reads the note as a hint of the lifelong tension between Mailer's desire to write novels and his need to write nonfiction.
A short letter to Willie Morris, newly editor of Harper’s, begging off article work: “writing articles has a bit of drudgery to it for me, and now I’m free, for a year at least, to work on a novel.” As Lennon observes, the note hints at the lifelong tension between Mailer’s desire to write novels and the financial need to write shorter nonfiction — a tension he later resolved, in part, with the long fictive narratives (The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, The Prisoner of Sex) that first appeared in Harper’s.