68.7a

“The sophomores at Notre Dame.” Article by Granville Hicks. Saturday Review, 4 May, 19-21. Account of the Sophomore Literary Festival in which Hicks, Mailer, Vonnegut, Wright Morris, Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison and William F. Buckley took part. Mailer’s film Beyond the Law premiered at the festival. Hicks is unusually kind in his remarks on Mailer, whose books he invariably gave negative reviews. He liked Mailer’s reading from The Armies of the Night (68.8), and quotes his comment about President Johnson, who had just announced he would not run again: “Better to have a President who is large and evil than one who is small and ignoble.”