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ALTHOUGH SOMETIMES PURCHASED BECAUSE OF A PLAYMATE’ S ALLURE, most ''Playboy'' magazines get read cover-to-cover, confirming the quip “I buy it for the articles.” Because less than ten percent of each issue contains nudity, the majority of monthly pages are well-known editorial features, such as the ''Playboy'' Advisor or the ''Playboy'' Interview, advice columns, cultural commentary, humor and literary selections. Using ''Esquire'' as a model, Hugh Hefner published fiction to position ''Playboy'' as more than a mere “skin-magazine.” Hefner juxtaposed the nude pictorials with literature because he believed that, for proper stimulation, both the mind and body should be addressed. The quantity of fiction published in ''Playboy'' is astonishing, making fiction the single largest component of the magazine. In just its first year of publication, from December 1953 to 1954, ''Playboy'' devoted 168 pages to literary selections, over thirty percent of its content (Lambkin 26).{{sfn|Lambkin|2010|p=12}} In the 1960s the magazine maintained over 200-page issues and published elite critics and authors such as Alfred Kazin, William F. Buckley, Leslie Fiedler, Ray Bradbury, James Baldwin, and Vladimir Nabokov. Most of ''Playboy’s'' fiction is either written by popular, contemporary authors or can be classified as a parody by an unknown author of a famous story. The cultural currency of contemporary authors or familiar narratives helped sell copies—by 1973, ''Playboy’s'' paid circulation peaked at seven million per month (Pitzulo 12).{{sfn|Pitzulo|2011|p=12}} ''Playboy'' editors particularly sought out authors or fictional selections that would help them re-masculinize the act of reading in the midst of the Cold War gender debates. To fulfill this objective, editors first looked to Ernest Hemingway because the Hemingway code hero exemplifies the quintessential Playboy qualities—strong, adventuresome, educated, and womanizing

In 1956, Hefner hired ''Playboy’s'' first renowned literary editor, Auguste Comte Spectorsky, an up-and-coming journalist, for the express purpose of elevating the magazine’s literary content. Hefner considered Spectorsky “a real heavyweight” because of his literary talents and East Coast connections. Spectorsky’s ''The Exurbanites'' had recently reached the Best Sellers list, and he had the literary connections needed to “upgrade” ''Playboy’s'' fiction (Fraterrigo 32). Once on the editorial board, Spectorsky began recruiting personal friends to contribute the magazine. He solicited fiction and non-fiction pieces from Ken Purdy, Philip Wylie, Vance Packard, and John Steinbeck. Even if Hefner and Spectorsky did not always agree on lifestyle choices, they were both committed to producing a virile, high-culture publication. Hefner’s vision was to embellish and surround sex with the trappings of high culture. Spectorsky, on the other hand, wanted to “reinvent sophisticated culture itself by bracketing it with heterosexual desire” (Gilbert 207). Combining nude pictorials with good writing and sophisticated advertising allowed ''Playboy'' the opportunity to re-masculinize both reading and consumerism, two activities that were supposedly feminized during the post-war era.

Spectorsky viewed ''Playboy'' as his platform to “redefine male readers as ‘whole men’” (Gilbert 207). He wrote:

<blockquote> Each issue is a tacit statement to [readers] that they are responsive to fine fiction and to pretty girls; to Lucullan dining and drinking and to serious articles and interviews that bear directly or philosophically on today’s serious issues; to sports cars and classical music, jazz, fashion, the struggle for civil rights, bachelor high-life, and the world of business and finance. (qtd. in Gilbert 207) </blockquote>

literary guidelines suggest that Hefner and Spectorsky believed that literary selections were a crucial component of the ethos of ''Playboy.'' Spectorsky instructed his fiction staff to discard any “castration-defeat-doom stories” in favor of “Hemingway heroes . . . who deal with the world instead of cringing and having high-tone failures” (Gilbert 208). Spectorsky also based much of his criteria for quality fiction on Hemingway’s writing style—clear, economical prose, machismo or womanizing, rich imagery, and simple, albeit vigorous, word choice. Using Hemingway, the author and the man, to advertise the magazine’s commitment to masculinity, Spectorsky helped resurrect the masculine, intellectual man during the 1950s gender debates.

As articles in the 2010 issue of the ''Norman Mailer Review'' illustrate, the connections between Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer range from bullfights to multiple wives. Erik Nakjavani argues that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer was so acute that the younger author “came to ''embody'' Hemingway’s influence, identifying with him” and developing affinities with him (166, emphasis original). Scholars such as J. Michael Lennon, James Meredith, Mark Cirino, and Barry Leeds prove that themes of boxing, war, violence, and firearms unite two of the most famous twentieth-century century writers. Constructing female characters as objects also links them. In “Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman,” Mimi Glad- stein chronicles how both authors became “favorite whipping boys for feminist critics” for creating a “certain kind of fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses, by which they allow themselves, imaginatively, privileges that they did not have in life” (288-89). And, in “Hemingway, Mailer,

and the ‘Reds’,” Victor Peppard rightly asserts that their common interests are “no secret.” Both authors were preoccupied with “macho tests of manhood.” Hemingway’s interests included hunting big game, boxing, and bullfights, and while Mailer was “more of a boxer than a bullfighter . . . he was always a battler whatever the arena” (Peppard 227). Tests of manhood often appear in their respective works and they both became controversial cultural figures in their personal lives. Both continue to loom over the American cultural landscape because of their notoriety and literary achievements.

Hemingway’s literary presence dictated much of ''Playboy’s'' editorial content, even though his words appeared minimally in the magazine. According to Thomas Weyr’s ''Reaching for Paradise'', Hefner desperately wanted to include a Hemingway original in the inaugural 1953 issue (10). Yet due to the magazine’s content and budgetary restraints—''Playboy’s'' first issue’s editorial content only cost $2,000—Hefner could not obtain the Hemingway, John O’Hara, or James Thurber pieces he so desired (Weyr 10). ''The New Yorker'' “haughtily” refused to sell Hefner reprint rights for a Thurber piece and Hemingway’s publisher rejected Hefner’s request “because his magazine had not ‘demonstrated its character’” (Miller 35). It would take three years and over 300,000 subscribers until Hefner and Spectorsky could include Hemingway’s presence in the magazine. They commissioned Jed Kiley for his unauthorized Hemingway biography, which was serialized over eight issues. Beginning with the first installment of Kiley’s “Hemingway: A Title Bout in Ten Rounds,” Hefner and Spectorsky added to the myths of Papa. In the September 1956 “Playbill,” editors proclaimed Hemingway as a man of “unimpeachable morals” and possibly the “greatest writer in the world”(4). Editors reminded readers that Hemingway has, for many years, “hit the bottle, tum- bled wenches” and “enjoyed such organized carnage as war and bullfighting” (2). Quick to dismiss his actions as neither immoral nor sinful, editors described Hemingway as a cheater of death who became “a scarred and bearded American legend, a Great White Hunter, a husband of four wives, a winner of Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes” (2). They quoted Kazin’s praise of Hemingway as “the bronze god of the whole contemporary literary experience in America” (2). But what seems most important about the Hemingway myth is that he hails from a Midwest, middle-class family—the same family history as Hefner and many ''Playboy'' readers. His roots and eventual fame make Hemingway the quintessential ''Playboy'' author: growing out of middle- class America and a devoutly Christian home, Hemingway became “the

After the success of “Hemingway Speaks his Mind,” ''Playboy'' continued to use the myth of Hemingway to advance its literary selections and grand narrative. Editors even applied parodies of Hemingway’s famous titles to pictorials and satire pieces. For example, in the July 1961 issue editors published Barry Spacks’s “For Whom the Booth Tolls.” Editors meticulously labeled Spacks’s work “outrageous” in its “attention getting (and moneymaking) device” (5). Unlike satires and parodies of other authors, editors were careful to honor Hemingway. Later that same year, Spectorsky serialized Hemingway’s first authorized biography. Spectorsky paid a reported $25,000—approximately equivalent to $160,000 in current U.S. dollars— for the serialization rights (Hale). Beginning in December 1961, Leicester Hemingway’s “My Brother Ernest,” spanned four issues and over sixty pages. Published only eight months after Hemingway’s suicide, “My Brother Ernest” received favorable reviews from ''Playboy'' readers. The text was later expanded, published by Pineapple Press, and reached the ''New York Times'' list of 100 outstanding books for summer reading in 1962. ''Playboy'' continued the Hemingway trend with “Papa and the Playwright,” a review of Hemingway and Tennessee Williams, Evgeny Evtushenko’s “Meeting with Hemingway,” Patrick Hemingway’s “My Papa, Papa” and Hemingway’s only play, ''“The Fifth Column.”''

Relying so heavily on Hemingway allowed Spectorsky to “advertise the magazine’s commitment to masculinity” (Gilbert 209). His “reputation as a literary tough guy” had been well established in the 1930s (Osgerby 45). ''Esquire'' proudly featured Hemingway for his “rough-hewn machismo,” even offering him one thousand shares of stock in 1937 (Osgerby 47). Due to Hefner’s relationship with ''Esquire'' and Spectorsky’s desire to remasculinize readers, Hemingway became the obvious “godfather” for the journal during the early Cold War. Rather than publish what Spectorsky deemed literature of “morass incense and butterflies and Spanish moss, of ''précieuse'' style and hyperfine imagery,” ''Playboy'' published what it considered to be elite, although accessible, fiction for its masculine audience (2, Sept. 1956). It did not want any writers too busy “exploring stylistic jungles”; instead, it wanted Hemingway, “perhaps because he has trekked many a real jungle in his life” (4, Sept. 1956). Spectorsky claimed that he wanted to veer away from stories likely published by ''The New Yorker'', stories that reflected what he called a “womanized,” “neurotic,” and “castrating world”(Gilbert 208). He promoted Hemingway’s attributes because he knew that ''Playboy'' “was surely” to “get literally hundreds of ‘fine’ stories a month which are intricate embroidery on the motto: The Sensitive Misfit is a More Interesting Man and a worthier Topic than the The Man Who Fulfils His Masculine Destiny” (Gilbert 208). Instead of wasting time reviewing stories about sensitive misfits or mutilated heroes, Spectorsky wanted Hemingway heroes.

And yet, ironically, Hemingway’s heroes are often castrated in one way or another. While many of Hemingway’s characters are “real” men on the battlefield or on the hunting grounds, they could also be classified as androgynous in terms of their sexuality. In ''Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism'', Richard Fantina reappraises the foundations of the old Hemingway myth of machismo and argues that his fiction’s “greatest legacy” may be the “embodiment of diverse models of masculinity”(3). Well before Hemingway scholars revised perceptions of him as the ultimate American macho man in the 1990s, ''Playboy'' editors subtly address misgivings about Heming- way’s sexuality. In the same “Playbill” that praises him in comparison to other contemporary writers as a “standing out like a rugged oak in a field of delicate pansies,” editors call Hemingway “sexually insecure”(2). Why would ''Playboy'' editors admit this in the same announcement that begins over a

Similar to its heralding of Hemingway, ''Playboy'' relied on the cultural myths surrounding Mailer. Beyond his combative prose, controversial comments, and wife stabbing, Mailer presides over American literature “longer and larger than any writer of his generation” (McGrath). The “most transparently ambitious author of his era,” Mailer was a prolific author, social commentator, and cultural provocateur (McGrath). He cofounded ''The Village Voice'', won the Pulitzer Prize twice, ran for New York City Mayor, married six different women, fathered eight children (and adopted a ninth), directed films, appeared on talk-shows, and participated in many interviews, making the Mailer name a household one. In short, Mailer’s ever-present, masculine persona, ambition, and the immense quantity of his work make him an appropriate Playboy contributor. Like Hemingway in the 1930s, Mailer had already established his tough-guy persona by the end of the 1950s. The violence in his war novel, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), and the obscenity in ''The Deer Park'' (1959) set the stage for Mailer’s 1959 ''Advertisements for Myself'': “a tough-guy writer’s apologia for his literary life” (Castronovo 180). In his life and literature, Mailer can stand in as a Hemingway hero, especially because Mailer lacked Hemingway’s ambiguous sexuality. Mailer consistently conducted himself with grace under pressure through the various tumults in his career. Thus, ''Playboy'' editors, from Spectorsky to Christine Hefner, frequently published Mailer to connect with their male readers. When reviewed as a body of work, Mailer’s multiple Playboy contributions reflect the historical shifts in post-war masculinity constructions, the same changes ''Playboy’s'' editorials depict. As a popular author with staggering amounts of testosterone present in his best-selling fiction, Mailer’s virile image fits comfortably into ''Playboy’s'' agenda. Beginning with an “After Hours” Book Review reference to ''The Deer Park'' in January 1958, and lasting to the publication of his conversation with Michael Lennon, “On the Authority of the Senses,” in December 2007, Mailer contributed directly to ''Playboy'' on seventeen occasions. Mailer’s numerous appearances in the magazine

Although an apropos ''Playboy'' author, Mailer’s relationship with ''Playboy'' involved lawsuits coupled with considerable praise. After ''Playboy'' editors paid Mailer for the essay report on the Buckley’s debates, Mailer sued ''Playboy'' on the grounds that his essay was worth more than the paid sum (Buckley). Mailer also wrote to the editors, denouncing them for labeling him a liberal: “I don’t care if people call me a radical, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist or even a left conservative, but please don’t ever call me a liberal” (8, April 1963). And later, in 1975, Elmo Henderson sued ‘’Playboy’’ for publishing “The Fight,” in which Mailer created the factoid that Henderson had been in an insane asylum (Manso 560). But according to one of ''Playboy’s'' executive editors, Arthur Kretchmer, Mailer was “a long-run investment” (Manso 561). In an excerpt from Peter Manso’s ''Mailer: His Life and Times’’, Kretchmer explains how ''Playboy'' did not “function on pornography or ''Enquirer''-like sensationalism. It functioned on the fact that people who read ''Playboy'' have a certain sense of upscale events, and Norman’s part of that psychology” (Manso 561). By distancing ''Playboy from Enquirer'', Kretchmer suggests that ''Playboy'' readers are much more sophisticated than those that read either sensational or pornographic media. Mailer’s contributions, then, are used to elevate the magazine’s content. In the 1970s, Kretchmer wanted to publish a magazine that

<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 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

flamboyant ''Playboy'' empire and this exchange of praise reveals how integral cultural myths can be for the success of a mass produced, glossy magazine. ''Playboy'' commissioned Mailer to support its agenda as a with-the-times magazine and to “further gentrif[y]” its heterosexual perception (Schuchardt). In the first ''Playboy'' “Panel” on “Censorship in Literature and the Arts,” editors introduced Mailer as “among the forefront of individualistic, iconoclastically outspoken American author” (27, July 1961). Throughout the panel exchanges, Mailer lived up to that introduction: he “polemicized against masturbation and argued that open labeling of pornographic literature as such was vital for ‘the health and life of the republic,’ but that pleading its socially redeeming values was not” (Weyr 92). Mailer’s insights on censorship shine amidst the jumbled thinking presented by the other panelists and he was asked to return for the next year’s panel on “The Womanization of America” (June 1962). The panel, which was Spectorsky’s idea, was intended to respond to Philip Wylie’s scathing arguments regarding a supposed power shift between the genders—and Mailer’s career and personal life made him well-suited for the discussion. By 1962 Mailer had published three bestsellers and married three different women.

criticism, “The Prisoner of Sex,” sparked acrimonious debates, like the very public, 1971 Town Hall debate with feminists Germaine Greer and Jill Johnston. And at the 1986 birthday celebration of the Feminist Writers Guild, attendants played “Pin the Tail on Norman Mailer” in “satiric protest against what they consider his antifeminist writings” (Blades). In a similar vein, ''Playboy'' has dealt with its own share of feminist critique for the past five decades. From its inception, critics have lambasted the magazine for its centerfold: “it fetishized busty, young bodies for straight male consumption” (Pitzulo 35). {{sfn|Pitzulo|2011|p=35}} ''Playboy'' garnered backlash from feminists, such as Betty Friedan, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Gloria Steinem, as well as anti-pornography activists Gail Dines and Catharine MacKinnon. Steinem published her damning exposé on working conditions at the ''Playboy'' clubs in ''Show'' magazine and faced-off with Hefner for ''McCall’s'' magazine in a lengthy interview in 1970. Copies of ''Playboy'' were tossed into a “freedom trashcan” as part of the 1968 Miss America Pageant protest and ''Playboy'' confronted the feminist movement with its article “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig” (May 1970). Hefner intended the piece to criticize radical feminists, but his condemnation of the militants solidified his—and ''Playboy''’s—reputation as anti-feminist.

''Playboy'' editors balanced the negative attention from Steinem’s experience as a ''Playboy'' Bunny with Mailer’s appreciation of the clubs. Mailer’s presence at the ''Playboy'' clubs and mansion “lent” them “literary and symbolic cachet they have won from few other public personalities” (Weyr 78). In “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” Mailer does not censure the guests’ egregious behavior toward the female employees, nor does he disapprove of the Bunnies’ attire. Instead, Mailer matter-of-factly states that the club “looked about the way one thought it would look” with corporate executive patrons and Bunnies in all colors (qtd. in Weyr 78). Whereas Steinem claimed the boning in her bunny costume would have made “Scarlett O’Hara blanch and the entire construction tended to push all available flesh up to the bosom,” Mailer complimented the outfits: the Bunny costume “exaggerated their hips, bound their waist in a ceinture and lifted them into phallic brassiere” (Steinem 39; Weyr 78). In his ''Presidential Papers'', Mailer compares a Bunny’s breasts to the “big bullet[s] on the front bumper of a Cadillac” (23). Mailer’s approval of the costume, like his comparison of Hefner to Fitzgerald, captured how editors wanted the culture to view ''Playboy''—as an American icon.  

Kretchmer classified ''Playboy’''s “dynamics” with Mailer as “interesting” because ''Playboy'' did not publish his fiction “for direct sales” (Manso 561). Unlike other writers, such as Ian Fleming or Joseph Heller, who were understood as more commercial, ''Playboy'' published Mailer “simply” because he is “the most interesting writer, a writer you want to publish if you’re editing a magazine, and whether or not all of ''Playboy''’s readers are going to line up eagerly to buy the issue doesn’t really come into play” (Manso 561). Therefore, including Mailer in the magazine was more about building the ''Playboy'' brand than selling copies. Editors commissioned Mailer, like Hemingway, for his cultural status rather than his literature.

In comparison to some of Hemingway’s fiction in which castrated heroes do not always abide by the code, Mailer’s ''Playboy'' fiction offers a range of masculinity models for readers. According to Robert Caserio’s editorial introduction to the ''Journal of Modern Literature'', Mailer’s later fiction represents a “‘queering’ of his picture of masculinity,” and the novel ''Ancient Evenings'', in particular, suggests a “surrender and uncoupling” of Mailer’s ideas about masculinity and moral bravery (v, vi). In comparison to his 1960s works, like ''An American Dream and Why are We in Vietnam?, Ancient Evenings'' deals with homosexuality in “tolerant and even erotic fashion” (Dearborn 121). The novel’s protagonist narrator, a eunuch in a large harem, is anally penetrated and the most politically powerful man in the novel “gave Himself up to the little queens as if He were a woman” (124, April 1983). In an interview with John Whalen-Bridge regarding his later works, Mailer admits that, until ''Ancient Evenings'', he did not recognize homosexuality as “an element in all men” and has since come to understand homosexuality as “a bigger theme than [he] ever gave it credit for being” (vi). This change in views regarding sexuality suggests that Mailer revised his masculinist ideal in his later fiction and the ''Playboy'' excerpt of ''Ancient Evenings'' illustrates this revision. Magazine readers might have expected selections from the 700-page-plus novel to be more in line with ''Playboy''’s heterosexual agenda, but Mailer chose to include scenes that deal with “a spectrum of male motivation leading from homosexuality to machismo” (Lennon 331). Within the ''Playboy'' excerpts of ''Ancient Evenings'', Mailer explores power relationships between men and depicts various masculinity models.

Similar to the excerpts from ''Ancient Evenings'', Mailer’s “Trial of the War- lock” deviates slightly from the model of masculinity presented in ''Playboy''’s strictly heterosexual editorial features. The story offers a “readable” “screen treatment” of J. K. Huysmans’s ''La Bas'' (Turner 333). Mailer appropriates the novel’s protagonist, Durtal, to revisit the 1891 fictional account of how Gilles de Rais transitions from being Joan of Arc’s second-in-command to a documented serial killer and practitioner of Satanism. The story seems to contain all of ''Playboy''’s necessary criteria: the hero is not castrated; he has no problem with blood or Satan—so he is obviously courageous. After swearing off sexual relations for religious reasons, Durtal becomes involved in a

the magazine’s internal contradictions, Michaud argues it is “not surprising” to find traditional narratives in ''Playboy'' “given the gender politics and the national anxiety over masculinity in the postwar period.” Michaud concludes that the gothic stories, while seemingly paradoxical to Hefner’s agenda, reflect postwar culture because they focus on marriage and family. According to Michaud, teaching bachelors to be heroic rescuers of distraught females will teach them to be good husbands.