Norman Mailer: Works and Days

Publishers and periodicals

74 Publisher pages, by kind

Entities: People · Places · Publishers · Organizations · Concepts

Book publisher 36

  • André Deutsch — British independent literary publisher founded in London in 1951 by the Hungarian-born émigré André Deutsch (1917–2000). Mailer's British publisher from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s; the firm's September 1961 edition of Advertisements for Myself (61.15) dropped, on legal advice, the second part of 'The Time of Her Time,' prompting Mailer's 400-word postscript denouncing British censorship — the full text was not restored until the 1968 Panther softcover.
  • Arbor House — New York trade publisher founded by Donald I. Fine; it issued the first hardcover edition of St. George and the Godfather (1983).
  • Arcade Publishing — New York trade publisher founded in 1988 by Richard and Jeannette Seaver; an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing since 2010. Arcade published the first edition of Mailer's Lipton's, A Marijuana Journal (2024).
  • Atlantic Monthly Press — New York literary publisher; it issued Mailer's Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (1995) after he left Random House over the project.
  • Ballantine Books — New York paperback house (founded 1952 by Ian and Betty Ballantine) that published "The Man Who Studied Yoga" (56.25) in its New Short Novels 2 anthology in 1956.
  • Cambridge University Press — The publishing house of the University of Cambridge — among the oldest in the world. It published Maggie McKinley's edited collection Norman Mailer in Context (2021) in its Literature in Context series.
  • Chronicle Books — San Francisco publisher of illustrated and photography books; it issued Couples: Speaking from the Heart (2000), to which Mailer contributed a statement, and Sally Soames's Writers: Photographs (1995).
  • City Lights Books — Lawrence Ferlinghetti's San Francisco bookstore (founded 1953) and publishing house, home of the Pocket Poets Series. City Lights issued Mailer's "The White Negro" (57.1) as a standalone pamphlet.
  • Dell Publishing — New York paperback house; co-acquired An American Dream with Dial and published The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (1967) and the softcover Deer Park: A Play.
  • Dial Press — American trade publisher (founded 1923) that became Mailer's primary American book publisher from An American Dream (1965) through the 1960s and into the early 1970s. The agreement was signed in the fall of 1963 by Mailer's new literary agent, Scott Meredith. Dial Press editor E. L. Doctorow was one of Mailer's editors for An American Dream.
  • Empire Books — Short-lived New York publisher; issued Hilary Mills's Mailer: A Biography (1982), the first book-length biography of Mailer.
  • Franklin Library — Pennsylvania fine-binding house (the Franklin Mint's book division) that issued signed, leather-bound limited editions; it produced a special edition of Tough Guys Don't Dance in 1984.
  • G. P. Putnam's Sons — The New York trade house (founded 1838) that became Mailer's publisher after Rinehart suppressed The Deer Park in 1954. Walter Minton accepted the novel when six other publishers had turned it down, and Putnam's published it on 14 October 1955.
  • Grosset & Dunlap — New York book publisher; issued the first edition of Mailer's Marilyn: A Biography (1973), the Schiller-produced picture-biography.
  • HarperCollins — Major New York trade publisher; it issued Lawrence Schiller's Into the Mirror (2002), based on the Mailer–Schiller Hanssen investigation.
  • Henry Holt and Company — New York book publisher; it issued the 50th-anniversary edition of The Naked and the Dead (1998), with a new introduction by Mailer.
  • Houghton Mifflin — Boston book publisher; it issued Mary V. Dearborn's Mailer: A Biography (1999).
  • L.B. Fischer — Short-lived New York trade publisher (active 1941–1949) that issued the 1944 Cross-Section: A Collection of New American Writing, edited by Edwin Seaver — the anthology in which Mailer's "A Calculus at Heaven" (44.1) appeared, making it Mailer's first book appearance.
  • Library of America — Nonprofit publisher of authoritative editions of America's literary heritage; in February 2018 issued a two-volume set of Mailer's 1960s work (and a boxed set), edited by J. Michael Lennon.
  • Little, Brown and Company — Boston book publisher; beginning with Of a Fire on the Moon (1971), the first of eight Mailer titles it would issue, including The Prisoner of Sex (1971).
  • Louisiana State University Press — The scholarly publishing house of Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge). It published Robert J. Begiebing's Norman Mailer at 100 (2022).
  • Macmillan (London) — British publishing house; it issued the UK edition of Ancient Evenings (May 1983).
  • Michael Joseph Ltd. — London book publisher; it issued the British edition of Tough Guys Don't Dance on 15 October 1984.
  • Nation Books — New York book publisher (an imprint associated with The Nation); issued Mickey Knox's memoir The Good, the Bad, and the Dolce Vita (2004), for which Mailer wrote a preface.
  • New American Library — New York paperback house (Signet and Mentor lines) that published the first edition of The Armies of the Night (1968) and the simultaneous softcover of Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
  • New English Library — British mass-market paperback publisher (Sevenoaks, Kent); it issued the UK softcover of Pieces and Pontifications and the omnibus The Essential Mailer (1982).
  • Paragon House — New York publisher; it issued Carl Rollyson's biography The Lives of Norman Mailer (1991).
  • Powerhouse Books — Brooklyn photography-book publisher; it issued Thomas Roma's Enduring Justice (2001), with a foreword by Mailer.
  • Random House — Major New York trade publisher, founded 1927 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer; it issued Jack Henry Abbott's In the Belly of the Beast (1981) and, from Ancient Evenings (1983) onward, became Mailer's own publisher for the rest of his career.
  • Rinehart & Company — New York trade publisher (1929–1960, descended from Farrar & Rinehart) that published Mailer's first two novels — The Naked and the Dead (1948) and Barbary Shore (1951).
  • Simon and Schuster — The New York publishing house (founded 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster) that issued the 1948 anthology Cross-Section, carrying the advance excerpt from The Naked and the Dead (48.1), and the 1958 book Mike Wallace Asks, which reprinted Mailer's Wallace interview (58.7).
  • Stein and Day — New York trade publisher founded by Sol Stein and Patricia Day; issued Harold Conrad's memoir Dear Muffo (1982), for which Mailer wrote a foreword.
  • University of South Carolina Press — The scholarly publishing arm of the University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC). It published Maggie McKinley's Understanding Norman Mailer (2017) in its Understanding Contemporary American Literature series.
  • University Press of Mississippi — Scholarly publisher whose Literary Conversations Series issued Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988), edited by J. Michael Lennon.
  • W. W. Norton & Company — Employee-owned New York publishing house; it issued Jean Davison's Oswald's Game (1983), for which Mailer wrote a foreword.
  • The World Publishing Company — The Cleveland and New York house that published the first edition of Miami and the Siege of Chicago on 24 October 1968, simultaneously with a New American Library softcover.

Journal 5

  • Evergreen Review — New York–based literary and political quarterly published by Barney Rosset's Grove Press from 1957 to 1973 — a primary American outlet for postwar avant-garde fiction, drama, and political writing, and a recurring venue for Mailer from 1962 through the late 1960s. Mailer's first appearance is the story "Truth and Being; Nothing and Time: A Broken Fragment from a Long Novel" in issue no. 26 (September–October 1962).
  • The Mailer Review — The annual scholarly journal of the Norman Mailer Society (with the University of South Florida), published since 2007; the principal venue for the first publication of Mailer's previously unpublished short fiction recovered from the Ransom Center.
  • The New York Review of Books — American literary and intellectual semi-monthly founded in early 1963 by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein during the 114-day New York newspaper strike (December 1962 – April 1963). Mailer's review of Morley Callaghan's That Summer in Paris — 'Punching Papa' — appears in the inaugural Winter 1963 issue (63.1), making Mailer one of the first writers to publish in the new journal. NYRB recurs as a major Mailer venue for the rest of his life.
  • Partisan Review — American cultural-political quarterly (1934–2003) edited for its flagship decades by Philip Rahv and William Phillips. Central journal of the New York intellectuals. The venue of Diana Trilling's "A Note on The Naked and the Dead" in 1948 (not in Lennon's bibliography but flagged in `backlog.md`); Mailer's first contribution is the symposium piece "Our Country and Our Culture" (52.1) in May–June 1952. PR will host Mailer on several further occasions through the 1950s, including 58.4 and 59.11.
  • The Times Literary Supplement — The Times Literary Supplement (TLS), the long-running London weekly of literary and cultural review (founded 1902). It published J. Michael Lennon's essay "The Naked and the Read: Inside the Library of Norman Mailer" on 9 March 2018.

Magazine 23

  • The Atlantic Monthly — Boston-founded American literary and cultural monthly (founded 1857; later The Atlantic). Mailer's first appearance is a set of five poems in the January 1962 issue (62.1), four of them later collected in Deaths for the Ladies.
  • Commentary — New York–based monthly of opinion, culture, and Jewish American letters; published by the American Jewish Committee since its founding in 1945. Mailer's first appearance is "Responses and Reactions I" in the December 1962 issue (62.22) — the inaugural installment of a bi-monthly Commentary column on Martin Buber's Tales of the Hasidim that runs through October 1963 (six installments total: 62.22, 63.16, 63.17, 63.18, 63.19, 63.20).
  • The Cornhill Magazine — The long-running London literary magazine, founded in 1860 (with William Makepeace Thackeray as its first editor) and published by John Murray until its close in 1975. Its summer 1953 number (no. 996) carried Mailer's very short story "The Notebook" (53.4), listing him among its cover contributors.
  • Counter-Spy — Magazine that grew out of Mailer's 'Fifth Estate' after its 1974 merger with the Committee for Action/Research on the Intelligence Community (CAR-IC); it published exposes of the CIA, to which Mailer contributed.
  • Dissent — The American quarterly of the democratic left, founded in 1954 by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser. Mailer's first appearance was "The Meaning of 'Western Defense'" (54.1) in the magazine's second number, issued 1 April 1954; he served on the Dissent editorial board from 1954 until the mid-1980s. Dissent would later publish his most influential essay, "The White Negro" (1957).
  • Esquire — American monthly magazine founded in 1933 by Arnold Gingrich and David A. Smart. Esquire was, by Lennon's count, the magazine "with which Mailer has been most closely identified" — home to more than forty Mailer contributions from the early 1950s through the 1970s. Mailer's first appearance is a letter to the editor on Ezra Pound in November 1951 (51.3a); his first story and substantive essay run in the April 1953 issue (53.1, 53.2).
  • Harper's Magazine — American monthly; published 'The Prisoner of Sex' as its March 1971 cover story, a controversy that contributed to editor Willie Morris's resignation and to Mailer's break with the magazine.
  • The Harvard Advocate — The undergraduate literary magazine of Harvard (founded 1866), to which Mailer was elected in April 1941 and which published his first three stories in print: "The Greatest Thing in the World" (April 1941), "Right Shoe on Left Foot" (May 1942), and "Maybe Next Year" (June 1942).
  • The Humanist — American magazine founded in 1941 as the organ of the American Humanist Association. Mailer contributes a symposium answer to its October–November 1951 issue: "Authors and Humanism" (51.3). The Humanist reprints the piece thirty years later, in its March–April 1981 issue.
  • Life — American picture weekly; Mailer's principal magazine venue at the turn of the 1970s, serializing the Apollo 11 material that became Of a Fire on the Moon (1969-70) and running 'Ego' on the first Ali-Frazier fight (1971).
  • Mademoiselle — American women's magazine published by Street & Smith and later Condé Nast (1935–2001); fiction and essays section noted in the 1950s and 1960s for placing serious literary contemporaries — Capote, Plath, McCarthy, Roth — alongside fashion. Mailer's appearance is the February 1961 'An Interview with Norman Mailer' by Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch (61.3), a substantial discussion of existentialism, 'The White Negro,' Eisenhower, Kennedy, Sartre, and Burroughs.
  • The New Republic — American liberal weekly founded 1914. Joseph P. Lash's "Weekend at the Waldorf" (49.2c), 18 April 1949, is the first New Republic entry in the Mailer bibliography. TNR will host further Mailer-related material across subsequent decades — notably Mailer's 1992 account of the Republican Convention, recorded in Lennon's 1992 Days entry.
  • New Statesman — British political and literary weekly founded in 1913 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Mailer's debut is the paired Richard Wollheim interview 'Living Like Heroes' (61.13) and the accompanying poem 'To the Lower Classes' (61.14), both in the issue of 29 September 1961 timed to coincide with the André Deutsch publication of Advertisements for Myself.
  • The New Yorker — The New Yorker gave Mailer an early "Talk of the Town" profile on 23 October 1948, "Rugged Times", written (unsigned) by Lillian Ross — marking the beginning of Ross's lifelong friendship with Mailer and the start of a long if sometimes contentious relationship between Mailer and the magazine.
  • One: The Homosexual Magazine — A pioneering American homophile magazine, published by ONE, Inc. beginning in 1953. Its January 1955 issue carried Mailer's essay "The Homosexual Villain" (55.1) as the cover feature.
  • The Paris Review — American literary quarterly founded in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton; long the principal venue for the Writers at Work interview series. Mailer's debut here is 'The First Day's Interview' (61.10, summer–fall 1961) — his first self-interview, prompted by his interest in Picasso, and the seed of the Metaphysics of the Belly / Political Economy of Time triptych in Cannibals and Christians (66.11).
  • Playboy — American men's magazine founded in 1953 by Hugh Hefner. Mailer's debut here is the July 1961 symposium contribution 'Sex and Censorship in Literature and the Arts' (61.8), a substantial early statement of his views on obscenity, censorship, and the writer's privileges; later reprinted, in part, as 'Petty Notes on Some Sex in America' (66.11, 68.11). Mailer would return often through the 1960s and 1970s — most famously in the January 1968 Brower interview.
  • politics — Independent leftist magazine founded, edited, and largely written by Dwight Macdonald from 1944 through 1949 — an anti-Stalinist, anti-war, democratic-socialist alternative to Partisan Review. Its final issue (volume 6, winter 1949) carries Macdonald's report "The Waldorf Conference" (49.1), quoting Mailer's March 1949 floor remarks.
  • Queen — British weekly society and fashion magazine, founded 1861 by Samuel Beeton (publisher of Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management). Under the Stevens-and-Beard editorship of the early 1960s, Queen was redirected toward sharp cultural reportage and arch satire (Mark Boxer was art director). Mailer's poem to Lady Jeanne Campbell, "Last Word on Love: Ode to Lady J.," appeared in Queen on 3 April 1962.
  • The Realist — New York–based magazine of "freethought criticism and satire," edited and published by Paul Krassner from 1958 to 2001. Mailer's appearance is "An Impolite Interview with Norman Mailer" in issue no. 40 (December 1962, pp. 1, 13–16, 18–23, 10) — an eleven-page Q&A reprinted complete in Krassner's later anthology Best of "The Realist" (Running Press, 1984).
  • Saturday Review — American literary weekly (founded 1924 as The Saturday Review of Literature) that gave Mailer his first magazine cover story on 8 May 1948, paired with Maxwell Geismar's review of The Naked and the Dead.
  • Story — American little magazine (founded 1931 by Whit Burnett and Martha Foley) devoted exclusively to short fiction; sponsor of the Eighth Annual College Contest won by Mailer's "The Greatest Thing in the World" in 1941 (prize: $100), and the venue for the story's first reprint in Story 19 (November–December 1941), 17–26.
  • World Review — A London magazine that published Mailer's short story "Pierrot" (53.3) in its New Series no. 50 (April–May 1953). Mailer later revised the story as "The Patron Saint of MacDougal Alley" for Advertisements for Myself (59.13).

Newspaper 2

  • The Harvard Crimson — The Harvard University student daily newspaper, founded 1873 — the oldest continuously published college daily in the United States. The 21 April 1941 Crimson editorial praising Mailer's first published story 'The Greatest Thing in the World' (41.1) is, per Lennon, 'the first published critical (and favorable) comment on Mailer's work.' Carries Paul S. Cowan's account of Mailer's 24 March 1963 Harvard appearance (63.26) and other notable Mailer items across the years.
  • The Village Voice — The Greenwich Village weekly newspaper that Mailer co-founded and named, with Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher; the first issue appeared on 26 October 1955. Mailer's "Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers" runs in the paper from January to May 1956 (56.1–56.17).

Small press 8

  • Caliban Press — Montclair, New Jersey fine press; it issued a limited edition of Mailer's essay Huckleberry Finn, Alive at 100 in 1985.
  • Etruscan Press — Etruscan Press is a nonprofit literary press associated with Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It published J. Michael Lennon's Mailer's Last Days (2022).
  • Eurographica — Helsinki fine-press publisher of signed, limited softcover editions by major writers; it issued Mailer's one-act play A Fragment From Vietnam in 1985.
  • Lord John Press — California fine press; it issued a signed limited edition of Mailer's Gulf War essay How the Wimp Won the War (1992).
  • The Permanent Press — Independent literary publisher in Sag Harbor, New York; it issued Marco Vassi's A Driving Passion (1992), with a preface by Mailer.
  • Provincetown Arts Press — Small press in Provincetown, Massachusetts, associated with the journal Provincetown Arts; issued the limited-edition booklet Norman Mailer's Provincetown: The Wild West of the East (2005).
  • Sligo Press — Small press in Shavertown, Pennsylvania; publisher of J. Michael Lennon's edition of Norman Mailer's Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969 (2004).
  • Targ Editions — New York fine-press imprint run by the bookman William Targ; it issued a 250-copy limited edition of Mailer's story 'The Last Night' in 1984.