A Folly Repeated: On Conviction and Creative Freedom, as Reflected by the Salman Rushdie Controversy
Mailer's statement on creative freedom in the Salman Rushdie crisis, read at the 22 February 1989 New York meeting of hundreds of writers and published in full in Writer's Digest that July. The fullest of his several 1989 interventions on the fatwa.
“A Folly Repeated” is Mailer’s statement on conviction and creative freedom in the Salman Rushdie crisis — the full text of the address he read at the 22 February 1989 New York meeting of hundreds of writers protesting the fatwa against the author of The Satanic Verses. It was published in Writer’s Digest in July 1989 (78–80); an excerpt, “We Must Be Willing to Die for Ideas,” had run in USA Today on 23 February (89.2). Among the writers present were Larry McMurtry, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, Susan Sontag, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Diana Trilling, Edward Said, Robert Stone, and Robert Caro.
The Rushdie affair drew Mailer into a sustained public role through the spring: he represented the writers at a 3 March news conference seeking common ground with American Muslims (89.3, 89.4) and joined 27 other writers from 21 countries in the New York Times Book Review’s “Words for Salman Rushdie” (89.5), where he turned the crisis into a recovery of conviction — “we writers who have no faith have been led back to one by your nightmare … your health!” The statement was reprinted in W. J. Weatherby’s Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to Death (1990, partial) and in The Time of Our Time (98.7).
Related pages
- Salman Rushdie | PEN American Center
- 1989
- Letter to Salman Rushdie (93.9)
- The Time of Our Time (98.7)