Steven Marcus
American literary critic and Columbia University professor. Mailer's interviewer for 'Norman Mailer: The Art of Fiction XXXII' in The Paris Review (Winter-Spring 1964) — one of the magazine's 'Writers at Work' interviews and, per Lennon, 'one of Mailer's most important' Q&As. Conducted on 6 July 1963; published in PR no. 31 (Winter-Spring 1964), 28-58. The interview is reprinted in major Mailer anthologies including Writers at Work: The 'Paris Review' Interviews (Viking, 1967), Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1972), Pieces and Pontifications (82.16) as 'Craft and Consciousness,' and Conversations with Norman Mailer (88.6, complete).
Steven Marcus was a Columbia University professor of English (Dickens, Freud, the nineteenth-century novel) and a longtime member of the Partisan Review editorial circle. His 1964 Paris Review “Art of Fiction” interview with Mailer is 64.1 — conducted at Mailer’s 142 Columbia Heights apartment on 6 July 1963 and published in Paris Review no. 31 (Winter–Spring 1964), pp. 28–58. Per Lennon, “one of Mailer’s most important” interviews; per Lennon’s Norman Mailer bibliography (Gale, 1986), one of four interviews — Stern-Lucid 1959, Krassner 1962 (62.21), Marcus 1963/1964, Carroll 1967 — that are “loaded with information on a wide range of topics and have been mined by critics, journalists and subsequent interviewers since they were published.” The Marcus interview develops Mailer’s standard positions on craft, the writing process, the unconscious’s “navigator,” and (per Lennon) the relation between style and personal belief.
Reprintings include Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews, 3rd ser., ed. Alfred Kazin (Viking, 1967); Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Leo Braudy (Prentice-Hall, 1972); partial in Cannibals and Christians (66.11); in Pieces and Pontifications (82.16) as “Craft and Consciousness”; and complete in Conversations with Norman Mailer (88.6).
Stub; to be expanded if Marcus’s Mailer engagement recurs.
Related pages
- 1964 | Norman Mailer: The Art of Fiction XXXII | The Paris Review
- Cannibals and Christians (66.11) | Pieces and Pontifications (82.16) | Conversations with Norman Mailer (88.6)