PEN American Center
American branch of International PEN; Mailer was elected its president in 1984 (term 1984–1986) and presided over the 48th International PEN Congress in New York in January 1986.
PEN American Center, the United States branch of International PEN — the worldwide association of poets, essayists, and novelists founded to defend free expression and the interests of writers — elected Mailer president in the summer of 1984 (84.9), his term running 1984–1986. In his statement to the annual meeting on 11 July 1984 he stressed that “writers can speak to one another across the world more quickly than can governments.” The presidency’s defining work was the 48th International PEN Congress, which Mailer organized and chaired in New York in January 1986 on the theme of “the imagination of the writer and the imagination of the state” — a gathering whose guest list and politics (the invitation to Secretary of State George Shultz, the exclusion of women from the opening panels) made it among the most contentious literary events of the decade.
Stub created during the 1984 ingest.