Nervous and alert as a ship’s captain scanning the horizon, Norman Mailer trotted over to the podium of Harvard’s Sanders Theater one evening this spring and surveyed his audience: bland, expectant undergraduates, neighborhood intellectuals and newly sedate veterans of the 1960’s — a generation complacent in its maturity.
A decade before, during a season of strikes on campus and riots in Harvard Square, he had addressed a very different sort of crowd; boisterous, irreverent, eager to be entertained, it was the sort of audience Mailer loved, and he had responded to their taunts with the crude invective and drunken bravado that invariably delight his followers.