The Presidential Papers

Mailer's second miscellany — published by Putnam's on 8 November 1963, two weeks before the Kennedy assassination. The dust jacket photograph shows Mailer seated in a Boston rocking chair in a deliberate visual echo of JFK's iconic rocking-chair publicity images; the rocker was removed from the cover of the May 1964 Bantam paperback (64.15) after the 22 November assassination. Discarded titles: 'The Devil Revisited'; 'Frankie and Johnny, Or, The Murder of Good Ideas.' Multi-name dedication. Mailer gives dates and details of composition for the volume's contents in 'Appendix B — Projects and Places.'

Jacket photograph of The Presidential Papers (Putnam's, 8 November 1963): Mailer in the JFK-style Boston rocking chair

The Presidential Papers. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 8 November 1963. London: André Deutsch, late April or early May 1964, with new preface (same as the Bantam paperback edition). Miscellany, 310 pp. Republished with “Special Preface” by Mailer: New York: Bantam, May 1964 (64.15); republished with new preface by Mailer: New York: Berkley, October 1976 (76.13).

Dedication

The dedication is one of the most extended in Mailer’s published books — a multi-name roll-call:

This book is dedicated to some ladies who have aided and impeded the author in his composition. They are: Beverly Rentz Sugarfoot Bentley; Jean Louise Slugger Campbell; my daughters: Susan, Dandy, Betsy, Kate; my adopted daughter: Jeanne H.W. the Invaluable Johnson; my secretary: Anne Morse Towel-Boy Barry; my sister: Barbara Jane Alson; and Sadie, and Hetty Diggs, and Every-Mae.

The dedication was set before Mailer’s 29 December 1963 marriage to Beverly Bentley but appears publicly in November — placing her first by intention rather than by alphabetical or chronological order. Lady Jeanne Campbell is the second name (the marriage to Jeanne dissolves on 16 December 1963 in Juarez, two weeks before the Bentley marriage). Then Mailer’s four daughters by name (Susan, Dandy, Betsy, Kate — the long-time family nicknames for Susan, Danielle, Elizabeth, and Kate Cailean), the adopted daughter Jeanne H.W. Johnson (Lady Jeanne Campbell’s daughter from a previous relationship, treated as Mailer’s adopted daughter during the 1962–1963 marriage), and Anne Morse Barry (Mailer’s secretary, whose photograph appears on the back panel of the An American Dream Dial Press edition).

Discarded titles

Per Lennon’s 63.37 entry and the May 1963 Brooklyn Heights Press interview (63.28): “The Devil Revisited” (also given by Important Dates) and “Frankie and Johnny, Or, The Murder of Good Ideas.” The latter title is used in the working manuscript as late as May 1963.

The jacket photograph

The Putnam’s jacket photograph (above) — designed before the Kennedy assassination — shows Mailer seated in a black Boston rocking chair against a plain white background, in a deliberate visual echo of John F. Kennedy’s iconic publicity photographs in a similar rocker (the Carolina-pine Kennedy rocker, prescribed for the President’s chronic back pain). The visual punchline is precise: Mailer-as-presidential-counterpart, the “Aquarius” hero who counterposes Kennedy. The rocker is removed from the cover of the May 1964 Bantam paperback (64.15) after the 22 November 1963 assassination, per the published Lennon Days (p. 354): “the photo on the jacket showing Mailer sitting in a J.F.K.-style rocking chair, designed before Kennedy’s assassination, is changed to eliminate the rocker when used on the cover of the 1964 paperback edition.”

Composition history

Mailer gives dates and details of composition for the volume’s contents in “Appendix B — Projects and Places,” and an “Appendix A — Professional Mendacity” in which he criticizes the 18 January 1963 Time review of Myrick Land‘s book (a context that informs the 63.40 letters-to-Myrick-Land sequence and the later Lexikos revised second edition of Land’s The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem).

Reception and Mailer on the book

Mailer on The Presidential Papers, from the 1976 Berkley reprint preface (76.13): “Its anxiety is its anxiety, and its half-satisfied ambition is very much its throttled ambition, but for anyone who would like a clue to the mood of the country in the summer of 1963 just before that autumn of assassination which would change the psychic history of America forever, the book is a document. Besides — I whisper it — The Presidential Papers does have a couple of the better pieces I’ve written.”

Reprintings

Several selections appear in 13.1, and in truncated form in 98.7.

Referenced by 60

Works

Letters

Days

People

Places

Publishers

First published: 1963-11-08
Form: collection
Lennon & Lennon: 63.37
Cite as: /works/1963-presidential-papers
Last updated: 2026-06-18