Edmund Skellings
Poet and professor; an admirer of Mailer's work who met him at a 1958 Esquire symposium. Mailer's early-1965 visit to Skellings in Alaska fed the writing of Why Are We in Vietnam?
Edmund Skellings, then a professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, met Mailer at an Esquire symposium at the University of Iowa in December 1958. Mailer saw him again during his early-April 1965 visit to Alaska, and drew on his impressions of that trip for Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). In a brief 26 November 1963 letter (in the Letters collection) Mailer reports forwarding Skellings’s manuscript to his Putnam’s publisher, Walter Minton.