The Hazards and Sources of Writing
Essay in the Michigan Quarterly Review (summer 1985), the expanded version of the Hopwood Lecture Mailer gave at the University of Michigan in April 1984. Lennon calls it Mailer's longest essay on his craft and one of his most important.
“The Hazards and Sources of Writing” appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review 24 (summer 1985), 391–402 — the expanded, revised version of the Hopwood Lecture Mailer delivered at the University of Michigan in April 1984, itself a reworking of “A Sinister Occupation” (81.9). Lennon judges it “Mailer’s longest essay on his craft and one of his most important overall”: a sustained reflection on what writing costs the writer — its physical and psychic hazards — and on where, against those hazards, the work actually comes from.
The essay was reprinted in Speaking of Writing: Selected Hopwood Lectures, edited by Nicholas Delbanco (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), and later collected in Mind of an Outlaw (13.1).