Life and Letters: The Contender
David Denby's New Yorker profile-review (20 April 1998) — interview, review of The Time of Our Time, and career appreciation in one; Lennon calls it one of the finest appreciations of Mailer of the 1990s. Photographs by Richard Avedon.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
“Life and Letters: The Contender,” David Denby‘s New Yorker piece (20 April 1998, 60–71, with Richard Avedon‘s portraits), is at once an interview, a review of The Time of Our Time, and a career appreciation — by Lennon’s estimate “one of the finest appreciations of Mailer published in the 90s.” Pressed on whether ordering the anthology by composition would have made a “spiritual autobiography,” Mailer answered: “I’ve been waiting to become the hero of my own life in order to write it. I have never become the hero of my own life.”
A full transcription, held in the working archive pending rights clearance, is at full text.