User:NrmMGA5108/sandbox: Difference between revisions

<blockquote>reflect[s] what’s going on in America … and that magazine has to have Norman because it’s a different world without Norman. ‘’Playboy’’ with Norman is a magazine of the moment, of impact. Powerfully, incontestably, Norman has tried to express our era. He looks through infinity and says, ‘Who are we? What have we done? What can be done?’ (Manso 561) </blockquote>

Kretchmer’s insights implies that both ‘’Playboy’’ and Mailer worked to articulate America’s cultural concerns, and because of that shared objective, ‘’Playboy’’ editors dismissed the legal trouble in favor of a working relationship with Mailer.

Kretchmer seems beguiled by Mailer, but other magazine editors, like William Phillips of the ‘’Partisan Review’’ and Gordon Lish from ‘’Esquire’’, also solicited work from Mailer. Based on his growing fame, ‘’Esquire’’ accepted Mailer’s offer to write a monthly column, “The Big Bite,” which ran from November 1962 to December 1963 (Dearborn 179). Clay Felker, ‘’Esquire’’ editor, claimed that he assigned Mailer to write about Jackie Kennedy because “at ‘’Esquire’’ we loved to start fights” and hiring Mailer to write about the First Lady immediately after he had stabbed his wife was “obvious” (Manso 353). The enthusiasm surrounding Mailer as a magazine contributor was only reinforced when his “The Prisoner of Sex” (1971) sold more copies of ‘’Harper’s’’ than any other issue in the magazine’s history (Manso 462).

Like Kretchmer’s praise for the author, Mailer’s praise for the ‘’Playboy’’ empire and its founding editor seemed equally enthusiastic. When covering the Liston-Patterson fights, Mailer stayed at the ‘’Playboy’’ mansion and recorded his first impressions of an after-hours ‘’Playboy’’ party. After detailing the mansion’s exaggerated dimensions, Mailer compared Hefner to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s archetypal, white, male American hero: “one never saw one’s host except for once or twice in some odd hour of the night. He had a quality not unlike Jay Gatsby, he looked and talked like a lean, rather modest cowboy of middle size; there was something of a mustang about Hefner” (qtd. in Miller 130). Mailer claimed that Hefner was “not the kind of man one would have expected to see as the publisher of his magazine, or the owner of the Playboy Club, nor certainly as the undemanding host of his exceptional establishment” (qtd. in Miller 130). Here, Mailer hints at Hefner’s subtle allure. His unassuming demeanor makes him a surprising candidate for the head of the