Deborah Martinson
Biographer of Lillian Hellman and Occidental College professor of writing; a founding member and Board member of the Norman Mailer Society, program chair of several of its conferences, and a Mailer Review contributor. Mailer gave her interviews on Hellman.
Deborah Martinson (20 May 1946 – 26 April 2014) was a biographer and teacher of writing. She joined the faculty of Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1991 and by her death was professor of writing and rhetoric and director of writing programs there. She won the college’s Tod and Linda White Teaching Prize in 2009. She died of cancer at her home in Burbank, California, at the age of 67 (“Deborah Martinson, 1946–2014,” Occidental College, 29 Apr. 2014). Her birth date comes from the student paper’s obituary, as cited in the Society’s remembrance.
Her books were In the Presence of Audience: The Self in Diaries and Fiction (2003), on Woolf, Mansfield, Violet Hunt, and Lessing, and Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (Counterpoint, 2005). The Hellman biography followed her research for Phillip Schopper’s PBS documentary The Lives of Lillian Hellman. Mailer gave her interviews on Hellman for the book; she told the Society that they “provided much interesting and astute material about them both” (remembrance). At her death she had finished a life of the Alabama civil-rights activist Virginia Durr (Occidental College). She was also a summer faculty fellow at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown (Occidental College; see Norman Mailer Center).
In the Society
The Society’s conference biographies called Martinson a founding member of the Norman Mailer Society (2006). At the inaugural conference in Brooklyn in 2003 she compared Mailer and Hellman (minutes). In 2005 she volunteered to serve as the Society’s West Coast coordinator, bringing students to Provincetown (minutes). She sat on the Executive Board from about 2006 until her death and on the editorial board of The Mailer Review. She ran or helped run the conference programs for years. With Phillip Sipiora she was program chair in 2007 and co-chair in 2008, and she chaired the 2009 Washington program on her own. With Bonnie Culver she coordinated the 2011 joint conference with the James Jones Society in Austin. She spoke at nearly every conference from 2005 to 2013. In 2010 her subject was Norris Church Mailer‘s A Ticket to the Circus (remembrance; conference programs).
In The Mailer Review she wrote “Despite Our Differences” for the 2008 memorial issue. In it she recorded that she had not always agreed with Mailer, above all on women, and still mourned him as a feminist. For the 2009 issue she reviewed four Mailer biographies in “It Takes a Thief to Know a Thief” (Bibliography 2008; Bibliography 2009). At the 2014 business meeting J. Michael Lennon marked her death, and Lawrence Shainberg was elected to her Board seat (2014 minutes). Sipiora’s memorial in The Mailer Review 8 (2014) quotes Lennon as saying that she “certainly helped me get the right perspective for my Mailer biography” (remembrance).
Related pages
- Lillian Hellman | Norman Mailer Society | Phillip Sipiora | A Ticket to the Circus | Bibliography 2008 | Bibliography 2009 | 2014