Norman Mailer: Works and Days

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).

The Realist — founded in 1958 by Paul Krassner as a one-man magazine of “freethought criticism and satire” — was, through the 1960s, one of the principal vehicles of American countercultural and satirical journalism. The masthead motto, the magazine of sex and violence, sat under the title block. Mailer’s appearance is “An Impolite Interview with Norman Mailer” (62.21) in issue no. 40 (December 1962), running across pp. 1, 13–16, 18–23, and back to p. 10 — eleven pages of Krassner Q&A on hipster, totalitarianism, the FBI and CIA, the Kennedy administration, Cuba, sexuality, masturbation, the “Negro question,” mysticism, and Zen and the art of thumb-wrestling. The interview is partially reprinted 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).

Stub; to be expanded as the Mailer–Realist relationship recurs (see 93.8b).

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Last updated: 2026-05-27