The Surreal Professor
Marshall Ledger's Pennsylvania Gazette report, the fullest account of Mailer's week as the University of Pennsylvania's first Pappas Fellow in March 1983, with extended comment on the Abbott affair, 'The White Negro,' nuclear war, feminism, and Ancient Evenings.
“The Surreal Professor,” by Marshall Ledger in the Pennsylvania Gazette (the University of Pennsylvania alumni magazine; 87, May 1983, with a cover photograph of Mailer) — the longest report on Mailer’s week-long stint as Penn’s first Pappas Fellow in March 1983, and the hub here for that residency. Mailer’s visit, organized by his friend and Penn English Department chairman Robert F. Lucid, centered on a lecture titled “The White Negro Reconsidered,” followed by a pointed exchange with Black students about what one called his “antique view of blacks”; Mailer “neither completely endorsed nor disavowed” his old position (see 57.1). The article ranges over the Abbott affair, his relationship to America, nuclear war, feminism, homosexuality, James T. Farrell, the writing life, and Ancient Evenings (83.18). It was reprinted by Penn as a booklet, Pappas Fellows: Norman Mailer.
The week’s other coverage — 83.12 (Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer), 83.14, 83.15, 83.16 (the South St. Star pieces on his journalism and nuclear-war lectures), 83.21, and 83.37 — is recorded as rows in the 1983 bibliography, pointing here.