Mailer and Me
Barry H. Leeds's memoir 'Mailer and Me' (Connecticut Review, spring 1996), in which the first Mailer scholar recalls thirty years of meetings, conversations, and correspondence with him.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
“Mailer and Me,” a memoir by the Mailer scholar Barry H. Leeds, appeared in the Connecticut Review in spring 1996 (vol. 18, 5–12). Leeds — author of the first book-length study of Mailer, The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer (1969) — recalls thirty years of acquaintance, from reading The Naked and the Dead as a sixteen-year-old seaman and his father’s gift of Advertisements for Myself, through his unanswered early letters and a 3 a.m. drive to Provincetown in 1967 to find Mailer, to their many later meetings, conversations, and correspondence. It was later collected in Leeds’s A Moveable Beast: Scenes from My Life (2014).
A full transcription, held in the working archive pending rights clearance, is at full text.