Paul Krassner
Satirist, journalist, and founding editor of The Realist (1958–2001), the New York–based magazine of "freethought criticism and satire" — and Mailer's interviewer for "An Impolite Interview with Norman Mailer," The Realist No. 40 (December 1962), one of the most extensive Q&As Mailer ever sat for. Later a co-founder of the Yippies and a fixture of 1960s counterculture journalism.
Paul Krassner founded The Realist in 1958 as a one-man magazine of “freethought criticism and satire” — a New York–based journal that would become one of the period’s leading countercultural venues. His December 1962 interview with Mailer, “An Impolite Interview with Norman Mailer” (62.21), runs across eleven pages of dense Q&A — on hipsters, totalitarianism, the FBI and CIA, the Kennedy administration, Cuba, sexuality, masturbation, the “Negro question,” mysticism — and is reprinted partially in The Presidential Papers (63.37), The Idol and the Octopus (68.11), and Pieces and Pontifications (82.16), and complete in Best of “The Realist” (Krassner, ed., Philadelphia: Running Press, 1984). Krassner returns to the Mailer register later (see 93.8b). In 1967 he co-founds the Youth International Party (Yippies) with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
Stub; to be expanded.
Related pages
- 1962 | An Impolite Interview with Norman Mailer | The Realist
- The Presidential Papers (63.37) | The Idol and the Octopus: Political Writings by Norman Mailer on the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations (68.11) | Pieces and Pontifications (82.16)