Foreword to Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer
Mailer's first foreword, preface, or introduction to a book by another writer — the brief opening note to Seymour Krim's essay collection Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer. Reprinted in the revised, expanded 1968 E.P. Dutton edition.
Foreword to Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer, by Seymour Krim, 6. New York: Excelsior, softcover, December 1961. Foreword-as-essay.
Mailer’s first foreword, preface, or introduction to a book by another writer. Rpt: New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968 (revised, expanded edition).
Composition
The foreword is signed “New York, September 1960” — Mailer composed it fifteen months before Krim’s book appeared, in the late summer that produced “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” and immediately before the November stabbing of Adele. The piece is therefore a late-1960 artifact in the late-1961 book; for the chronology, the dating discrepancy is small but worth recording.
Full text
The full text (a single 197-word paragraph plus the dateline) is held in our working archive at Texts → Foreword to Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer (61.23) with rights: REQUEST-NEEDED. Project Mailer reprints it “with permission of the estate of Norman Mailer,” a useful precedent.