Cannibals and Christians

Mailer's third miscellany (after Advertisements for Myself and The Presidential Papers): essays, poems, interviews, and criticism gathered under the figure of a world divided between Cannibals and Christians. Published by Dial on 29 August 1966; dedicated, with heavy irony, to Lyndon B. Johnson.

Dust jacket of the first edition of Cannibals and Christians (Dial Press, 29 August 1966)

Cannibals and Christians (New York: Dial, 29 August 1966; London: Deutsch, 1967; miscellany, 400 pp., $5.95) is Mailer’s third gathering of occasional prose and poetry, after Advertisements for Myself (59.13) and The Presidential Papers (63.x). Its governing conceit divides the modern world between “Cannibals” and “Christians,” and its contents range across the 1964 Republican Convention, Vietnam, the novel, existential politics, and Mailer’s verse. The book’s opening salvo is characteristic: “Apocalypse or debauch is upon us. And we are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor… The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.”

The dedication reads, with heavy irony: “To Lyndon B. Johnson, whose name inspired young men to cheer for me in public.”

Contents and assembly

The miscellany collects, among much else, the Republican-Convention narrative “In the Red Light” (64.20); the Berkeley Vietnam Day speech “A Speech at Berkeley on Vietnam Day” (65.14); the Partisan Review “On Vietnam” symposium reply (65.19) as “A Happy Solution to Vietnam”; the Lindsay endorsement “Lindsay and the City” (65.22); the architecture essay “Cities Higher than Mountains” (65.2), whose “Vertical City” is echoed on the dust jacket; the three poems of 66.1; “Modes and Mutations” (66.5, revised as “The Argument Reinvigorated”); and “On Cannibals and Christians” (66.8, revised as “Introducing Our Argument”). “The Metaphysics of the Belly” is reprinted from 63.37.

The acknowledgments note that “Ministers of Taste,” letters to Robert B. Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, had appeared in Partisan Review; Lennon records that “an extensive search has failed to turn them up,” though they are reprinted in 67.11, 82.19, and 14.3.

Editions

The first U.S. edition was published by Dial Press on 29 August 1966 (400 pp., $5.95). The André Deutsch British edition (1967) dropped all but one of the 54 poems in the American edition (restored in later printings); first-state copies lack an “A” on the inside back flap of the dust wrapper and carry a truncated introduction.

Reprintings

“The Metaphysics of the Belly” is reprinted from 63.37; several selections appear, usually truncated, in The Time of Our Time (98.7); others are reprinted in full in 13.1.

Reception

Reviews were largely positive. Eliot Fremont-Smith asked “A Nobel for Norman?” (New York Times, 22 August 1966); Wilfrid Sheed’s “One-Man Dance Marathon” led the New York Times Book Review (21 August); John Wain praised “Mailer’s America” (New Republic, 1 October). Oscar Handlin (Atlantic, October) dissented. Mailer complained of misquotation in the 29 August review in “Mail from Mailer” (66.12, Newsweek).

Referenced by 46

Works

Letters

Mail from Mailer

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People

Publishers

First published: 1966-08-29
Form: collection
Lennon & Lennon: 66.11
Cite as: /works/1966-cannibals-and-christians
Last updated: 2026-06-18