The Mailer Review/Volume 11, 2017/Reflections

This year marks Volume 11 of the Review. As many of our readers know, the production of this issue has been exceptionally challenging as we experienced significant delays beyond our control. However, we are back on track and Volume 12 is scheduled to be published this October.

The future continues to burn brightly in Mailer Studies and popular and scholarly interest in the life and work of Norman Mailer continues to be vibrant. Perhaps the strongest indication of the escalating interest in Mailer’s literary and discursive work was the decision by The Library of America to include Norman Mailer in their register of essential works in America. The LoA launch, in 2018, includes a boxed set of two volumes, The 1960s Collection, and both volumes were edited by J. Michael Lennon. The collector’s set is densely packed: Volume One: Four Books of the 1960s includes An American Dream, Why Are We in Vietnam?, The Armies of the Night, and Miami and the Siege of Chicago. The second inclusion, Volume Two: Collected Essays of the 1960s, includes a wide swath range of Mailer’s discursive writing in a critical decade of intellectual, social, and cultural growth for Mailer rising.

The dissemination of Mailer resources continues apace as new research tools, insightful analysis, and archival texts emerge from Mailer’s vast, diverse lifetime oeuvre of creativity. In 2018, J. Michael Lennon, Donna Pedro Lennon, and Gerald Lucas (editor) published a new, significantly revised, enhanced edition of Works and Days, an exhaustive compendium of source materials for Mailer’s vast, prodigious output, beginning in the 1940s. A published version of Mailer’s Lipton’s Journal, a memoir of reflections written in the 1950s, will be out soon. It is edited by Susan Mailer, J. Michael Lennon, and Gerald Lucas. Maggie McKinley is completing a book, Mailer in Context (Cambridge UP). Two Mailers, a play in development and directed by Ron Fried, was inspired by The Big Empty, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer’s collection of interviews. Susan Mailer’s book, In Another Place: With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer, will be published in November by Northampton House Press.

I would like to thank Scott Neumeister for his excellent work as Managing Editor of the Review for three years and I welcome Chondell Villines as our new Managing Editor. Both editors contributed their valuable skills to Volume 11. Michael Shuman, our long time Deputy Editor, continues his invaluable work as we persistently strive to publish salient commentary on the life and work of Norman Mailer.

I am sad to note that Professor Andrew M. Gordon (University of Florida) passed away in October of 2018. Andy was an energized presence at Mailer Society conferences as well as a devoted reader of and contributor to the Review. This issue includes an essay that Andy wrote about Mailer’s visit to Gainesville in 1986. Andy will be sorely missed.

Phillip Sipiora