06.1

“A Conversation with Norman Mailer.” Article-interview by Marcia Karp. ALSC Newsletter (publication of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics), 12 (winter), 10–11. Excerpts from the keynote event of the 205 ALSC conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at which J. Michael Lennon interviewed Mailer. Asked about the 1950s, Mailer said [ellipses in original]:

“ All decades have some new things, but the fifties were awful. You had to fight for liberty. . . . None of the five major obscenities were allowed. . . . Sexual repression. . . . One good thing about the fifties was they created the sixties. . . . Only some people were reached by the fifties self-criticism. Fiction then did have more liberty than film or the theater. ”