Advertisements for Myself

Mailer's great omnibus — a 532-page miscellany gathering his stories, essays, columns, interviews, poems, and fragments, stitched together by the italicized first-person "advertisements" that give the book its title and its self-mythologizing method. Published by Putnam's on 6 November 1959, it relaunched Mailer's reputation after the lean middle 1950s and collected the decade's key pieces — "The White Negro," "The Man Who Studied Yoga," and "The Mind of an Outlaw" among them.

Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam’s, 6 November 1959; London: André Deutsch, 29 September 1961. Miscellany, 532 pp., $5. The original working title was “The Hip and the Square: A Miscellany”.

The British Deutsch edition dropped, on legal advice, the second part of “The Time of Her Time” — twenty of twenty-six pages. Mailer’s 400-word polemical postscript (61.15) names the censorship and challenges British writers to fight it. The full text was restored only in the 1968 Panther softcover.

Dedication: “I dedicate this book to the memory of Anne Mailer Kessler (1889–1958) and to David Kessler and to my father Isaac Barnett (‘Barney’) Mailer”.

The “advertisements”

The book’s connective tissue is a sequence of italicized autobiographical “advertisements” in which Mailer frames, defends, and second-guesses the collected pieces — the device that makes the miscellany a single self-portrait rather than a gathering of leftovers. Mailer later reflected (76.14):

So Advertisements became the book in which I tried to separate my legitimate spiritual bile from my self-pity, and maybe it was the hardest continuing task I had yet set myself. What aggravated every problem was that I was also trying to give up smoking, and the advertisements in this book, printed in italics, are testimony to the different way I was now obliged to use language.

What it gathers

Among the major pieces collected (often revised, with new prefaces) are “The White Negro” (57.1), “The Man Who Studied Yoga” (56.25), “Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out” (58.4), “Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room” (59.10), the “Fourth Advertisement for Myself: The Last Draft of The Deer Park” (a revision of “The Mind of an Outlaw,” 59.14), scenes from the Deer Park play, and much of the short fiction and the Quickly columns. Portions appeared in periodicals around the book’s release (e.g., 59.10, 59.12, 59.14) — a heralding tactic Mailer used for most of his major books from 1959 on.

Reprints

Rpt: republished with a new Mailer preface (New York: Berkley, December 1976 = 76.16); the preface reappears (minus its first paragraph) as “An Advertisement Advertised” in 82.16. All of the short stories appear in 67.11 and 82.19; several selections appear in 98.7 and 13.1.

Related pages

• 1959 | G. P. Putnam's Sons
• The White Negro | The Man Who Studied Yoga | The Mind of an Outlaw | The Deer Park | Hipster
• Untitled postscript to 'The Time of Her Time' (61.15) | Preface to The Deer Park (76.14) | Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out (58.4) | Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room (59.10) | Sentiments Larger than Work (59.12) | Preface to Advertisements for Myself (76.16) | The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (67.11) | The Essential Mailer (82.19) | The Time of Our Time (98.7)

First published: 1959-11-06
Form: collection
Lennon & Lennon: 59.13
Cite as: /works/1959-11-06-advertisements-for-myself
Last updated: 2026-05-26