Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers

Mailer's seventeen weekly columns for The Village Voice (56.1–56.17), running 11 January–2 May 1956 under the title "Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers" (originally "Thinkers"); the last three are titled "The Hip and the Square." This hub gathers the series; each column also has its own page.

“Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers” was Mailer’s first regular column, introduced by publisher Edwin Fancher on 4 January 1956. He wrote seventeen weekly installments from 11 January to 2 May 1956 before resigning over editorial differences with his partners. Six of the columns are collected in The Village Voice Reader, ed. Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher (Doubleday, 1962); most are reprinted in Advertisements for Myself (59.13).

The columns

• 56.1 — 11 January. Introduction and raison d’être for the column.
• 56.2 — 18 January. On lies, power, obscenity.
• 56.3 — 25 January. Parodies of gossip columnists.
• 56.4 — 1 February. Kenneth J. Schmidt’s parody of the 18 January column; a dialogue with Mailer’s daughter Susan, age six.
• 56.5 — 8 February. On the distortions of the media.
• 56.6 — 15 February. A parody “by my good friend and competitor, Sergius O’Shaugnessy,” ending in reflections on virtue, liberty, and action.
• 56.7 — 22 February. Appreciations of Steve Allen, George Gobel, and Ernie Kovacs, with “odd thoughts” on narcissism.
• 56.8 — 29 February. An invitation to debate him on psychoanalysis.
• 56.9 — 7 March. A eulogy for Robert Lindner, with quotes from The Fifty-Minute Hour.
• 56.10 — 14 March. A debate with “Dr. Y,” a Greenwich Village psychoanalyst.
• 56.11 — 21 March. More on psychoanalysis, and the qualifications of Mailer’s unnamed nominee for the Democratic presidential nomination.
• 56.12 — 28 March. The nomination of Ernest Hemingway for President (with a photograph of Hemingway).
• 56.13 — 4 April. Readers’ letters and Mailer’s responses (“Let others profit by my unseemly self-absorption…”).
• 56.14 — 11 April. Letters from Joe Jensen and “J.V.W.,” with replies.
• 56.15 — 18 April. On the deaths of six U.S. Marines at Parris Island; reprinted as “The Tragedy at Parris Island,” Dissent 3 (fall 1956).
• 56.16 — 25 April. Barnard Zemble on the definition of “Hip,” and Mailer’s reply — foreshadowing “The White Negro” (57.1).
• 56.17 — 2 May. On Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, with Sergius O’Shaughnessy’s poem “The Drunk’s Bebop and Chowder” from The Deer Park.

Mailer’s resignation followed the Godot column; he restated and reversed his position in the paid “A Public Notice” (56.26, 9 May). A set of reader-correspondence replies in the Voice runs alongside the column: 56.18, 56.19, 56.20, 56.21, 56.22, 56.23, and 56.24.

Related pages

• 1956 | The Village Voice
• A Public Notice by Norman Mailer | The Man Who Studied Yoga | The White Negro
• Advertisements for Myself (59.13)

First published: 1956-01-11
Form: collection
Cite as: /works/1956-01-11-quickly-column
Last updated: 2026-06-01