Norman Mailer: Works and Days

Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)

Mailer's first book of poems and his first book under the G. P. Putnam's Sons imprint. Published simultaneously in the United States and Britain — Putnam's, $4.00, hardcover and paperback; Deutsch (London), paperback only — with a black jacket whose title block is set sideways in white display type. 252 unnumbered pages of poems and short prose. Dedicated to Lady Jeanne Campbell: 'To Jean (sic) Campbell.' Republished with a new prefatory essay by Mailer in December 1971 by New American Library (71.31). Conflicting Lennon date: the published Days places the book in January 1962; the Works register at 30 March 1962, the date followed here.

Cover of Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters), Putnam's, 1962

Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters). New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 30 March 1962; simultaneously as a softcover; London: André Deutsch, softcover only. Poems. 252 unnumbered pages, $4.00. Mailer’s first book of poems and his first book under the Putnam’s imprint after the Rinehart years (NAD, Barbary Shore) and the Putnam’s-then-Dial transition that began with The Deer Park (1955). Dedication: “To Jean (sic) Campbell” — preserving the misrendering of Lady Jeanne Campbell‘s name; Jeanne is Mailer’s third wife as of 4 May 1962. Republished with a new prefatory essay by Mailer in December 1971 by New American Library (71.31).

Publication date — a Lennon-internal conflict

The publication date in this register (30 March 1962) is the date given in J. Michael Lennon‘s Works and Days Works register, citing the U.S. publication as Putnam’s, “30 March.” The published Lennon Days (p. 13), however, opens its 1962 paragraph: “Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters), Mailer’s first poetry collection, is published in January” — and the JML Days revised RTF reads identically. The new Lennon Mailer bibliography (Gale Bibliographical Series, 1986) gives the year only (“New York: Putnam’s, 1962; London: Deutsch, 1962”), neither confirming nor refuting either month. This page follows the Works register’s 30 March 1962 per the editor’s call, and names the conflict here in prose rather than re-rewriting either Lennon source; a future NYT book-section archive lookup or Putnam’s deposit-copy check should settle it for the project’s verification queue.

Physical book

The book is a strikingly minimal physical object. The Putnam’s jacket is solid black, with the title and the author’s name set sideways in white serif display type across the cover, reading bottom-to-top: Deaths For The Ladies / (and other disasters) / by Norman Mailer. The text block contains 252 pages, unnumbered, of poems and short prose pieces. Mailer’s explanation for the unnumbered pages, given to Martha MacGregor at the Algonquin Hotel in New York on 4 March (62.5): “I want it to be a bit of a physical experience to read this book. You’ll have to do a lot of thumbing to find things. The book will be dog-eared, what every author wants.”

Reception

Reception was unenthusiastic. Charles Simmons in Time (30 March 1962) reviewed the book in verse-as-review, prompting Mailer’s “Poem to the Book Review at Time” (62.8, 6 April). Reviewers more generally treated the book as a misstep — Mailer the novelist trying his hand at poems and producing, in the dominant verdict, neither novels nor poems. A Newsweek review-interview by an unidentified writer (“Two Bucks — 20 Dances,” 62.5a, 12 March 1962) caught Mailer at the moment of his self-description as “an amateur poet” — “When it comes to poets like a Yeats — I play fraternity house piano” — alongside his anxieties that America may become “the finest and most exquisite expression of totalitarianism” and his proposal of “I propose the Resist!” against the Twist.

Composition and dating

Per Mailer’s 1971 preface to the NAL paperback (71.31): “Deaths for the Ladies was written through a period of fifteen months, a time when my life was going through many changes including a short stretch in jail, the abrupt dissolution of one marriage, and the beginning of another.” The fifteen-month composition window, counted back from a January or March 1962 publication, places the writing across roughly late 1960 through early 1962 — i.e., the period spanning the 20 November 1960 stabbing of Adele, the November 1960–November 1961 court proceedings, the meeting with Lady Jeanne Campbell in March 1961, the late-February 1962 Juarez divorce from Adele, and the 4 May 1962 marriage to Jeanne (per the published Days, p. 13). The 1971 preface continues: “It was also a period in which I wrote very little, and so these poems and short turns of prose were my lonely connection to the one act which gave a sense of self-importance. I was drinking heavily in that period…”

Reprintings

In the Works and Days register, six of Mailer’s poems from Deaths for the Ladies are reprinted in Seymour Krim‘s Nugget in April 1962 (62.7) under the title “Art of the Short Hair: Poetry by Norman Mailer.” Selected poems and short turns of prose recur across The Presidential Papers (63.37), Cannibals and Christians (66.11), Existential Errands (72.7, with preface and dedication), and Pieces and Pontifications (82.19, preface only). Of particular interest is the reprinting of “The Harbors of the Moon” in 63.37, 84.17, 98.7, 05.15; and “Togetherness” in 98.7.

What Mailer said about the book

Mailer on Deaths for the Ladies, in the preface to the 1971 NAL reprint (71.31): “I felt that all of Deaths for the Ladies made up one poem, not at all a great poem, never in any way, but still a most modern poem about a man loose in our city, for one cannot talk of New York without saying our city, there, majestic, choking in its own passions, New York, the true capital of the Twentieth Century. And Deaths for the Ladies was like a small sea breeze running through some of those electronic canyons where a myriad of fine moments were forever dying in the iridescence of foam.”

Referenced by 26

Works

Days

People

Places

Publishers

First published: 1962-03-30
Form: collection
Lennon & Lennon: 62.3
Cite as: /works/1962-03-30-deaths-for-the-ladies
Last updated: 2026-05-27