Foreword to Oswald's Game
Mailer's foreword to Jean Davison's Oswald's Game (1983), written when he still gave weight to the conspiracy theories around the Kennedy assassination; an early marker of the obsession that would produce Oswald's Tale (1995).
Mailer’s foreword (pp. 7–10) to Oswald’s Game, by Jean Davison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983). It was written, Lennon’s register notes, “when Mailer had greater faith in the various conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination” — an early sign of the preoccupation that would culminate in Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (95.16). Mailer dwells on the coincidences of his own life, among them that he had worked in the same Brooklyn studio building as the Soviet spymaster Colonel Rudolf Abel: “The net of conspiracy is always more or less finely woven than what we do perceive of it.” A full transcription (rights cleared) is held at full text.