Statement for Managing Mailer
Mailer's untitled prefatory statement (cover-flap blurb) for Joe Flaherty's Managing Mailer, an account of the 1969 Mailer-Breslin mayoral campaign by its campaign manager.
Mailer’s untitled prefatory statement — printed as a cover-flap blurb — appears in Managing Mailer, Joe Flaherty‘s account of the 1969 Mailer–Breslin mayoral campaign by its campaign manager (New York: Coward-McCann, 1 May 1970; London: Michael Joseph). Mailer, one of the “delicate egos” the book treats, writes that “Flaherty treats a dozen delicate egos like golf balls and then proceeds to see how far he can whap them,” and — since he cannot ban the book — leaps on the bandwagon, concluding that if every major politician had a campaign manager who wrote like Flaherty, “America would be out of its pollution.”
Flaherty’s earlier account of the campaign’s origins, “The Mailer-Breslin Ticket: Vote the Rascals In” (69.10), was incorporated into Managing Mailer. See the numerous 1969 entries on the mayoral campaign, gathered on the campaign hub.
The statement is reproduced on the cover of the 1975 Berkley Medallion paperback reissue. The full text is held in the working archive at full text.
Related pages
- 1970 | Joe Flaherty | The Mailer–Breslin Mayoral Campaign (1969) | Running against the Machine: A Grass Roots Race for the New York Mayoralty