Marc S. Triplett
Criminal-defense lawyer and life member of the Norman Mailer Society, its secretary since 2007, whose minutes are the Society's institutional record; a frequent conference speaker and moderator on Mailer's politics.
Marc S. Triplett is a lawyer with a criminal-defense trial and appellate practice. He took his B.A. at the University of Delaware in 1974 and his J.D. at Cumberland School of Law, Samford University, in 1977. A life member of the Norman Mailer Society, he has followed Mailer’s work since reading The Armies of the Night in 1968 (contributor note, The Mailer Review 2, 2008; Society conference biographies, 2006–2007).
Secretary of the Society
Triplett was at the Society’s meetings from early on; he seconded the motion approving the minutes at the 2005 business meeting. In October 2007, after Tara Sikora resigned as secretary, Barry Leeds nominated him, and he was elected secretary and to the Board for a term ending in 2010 (2007 minutes). From then on he signed the minutes of the business meetings and the Executive Board through 2023 (minutes; 2023 business meeting), and those minutes are the main record of the Society’s governance in those years. He was re-elected to the Board in 2013 and 2019, and continued as secretary in 2016, when Maggie McKinley nominated him again (2016 minutes). In 2015 he served as acting chair of the nominations committee and nominated McKinley as vice president and Justin Bozung to the Board. In 2017 he moved that the 2018 conference be held in Macon, Georgia (2017 minutes). The Society’s website still lists him as secretary. Its internal roster, however, records his Board term as having expired in 2025.
Mailer and politics
Triplett’s conference papers have centred on Mailer’s politics. He spoke on “The Political Mailer: The Left Conservative through the Decades” (2005); on Mailer’s 1969 mayoral campaign as an “Existential Errand” (2006); on why death-penalty defense lawyers should read The Executioner’s Song (2007); and on “Mailer and the Political Ego” (2009) (conference programs and biographies). He has often moderated sessions, among them The Deer Park at 60 (2015), “Mailer in Conversation: Philosophy, Film, and Literature” at the virtual 2020 conference, and “Mailer’s Short Fiction and Poetry” (2022). In 2015 he read Lonnie Pangborn in the conference’s staged reading of Tough Guys Don’t Dance (2015 conference).
His tribute in The Mailer Review’s 2008 memorial issue, “The Passing of Aquarius,” tells of a chance meeting with Mailer in a Senate office building in the late summer of 1972, when Mailer was conducting the interviews for St. George and the Godfather. Mailer shared a cab with him and asked his opinion of the McGovern ticket (Bibliography 2008). At the 2015 conference, the first after Barry Leeds’s death, Triplett led the session remembering him, and its transcript was printed as “Remembering Barry Leeds” in The Mailer Review 10 (2016) (Bibliography 2016).
The Society’s own documents sometimes spell his first name “Mark” (2005 conference listing and minutes; 2019 minutes). He signs as “Marc S. Triplett.”