The First Day's Interview
Mailer's debut in The Paris Review and his first published self-interview — prompted, he later said, by his interest in Pablo Picasso, and the seed of a self-interview triptych completed with 'The Metaphysics of the Belly' and 'The Political Economy of Time' in Cannibals and Christians (66.11). The Presidential Papers (63.37) reprinted it as the first of the trio.
“The First Day’s Interview.” Paris Review, no. 26 (summer–fall 1961), 140–53. Self-interview.
Mailer’s first appearance in The Paris Review and his first published self-interview — a form he would return to, prompted, he later said, by his interest in the life and work of Pablo Picasso. After this debut he wrote a much more ambitious second self-interview, “The Metaphysics of the Belly,” and a third, “The Political Economy of Time”; both later joined “The First Day’s Interview” in Cannibals and Christians (66.11). The Presidential Papers (63.37) reprinted “The First Day’s Interview” as the first of the trio, and Conversations with Norman Mailer (88.6) collected it again with later interviews.
The triptych is one of the principal Mailer-Picasso documents in his work.
Related pages
- 1961 | The Paris Review
- The Presidential Papers | Cannibals and Christians
- Mailer on Mailer (95.37) | Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography (95.38)
- Conversations with Norman Mailer (88.6)